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LIFE OF 



GrENEKAL GrEANT 



HIS POLITICAL RECORD, ETC. 



NELSON CROSS 

COUNSELLOR- AT-LAW 



When bad men combine, the good must associate." — BUBKB. 



NEW YORK 

J. S. REDFIELD, PUBLISHER 

140 Fulton Street 



C\.Jr- 



n^C 



LIFE OF 

General U. S. Grant. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

It is no part of the design of the present work to enter 
upon anything like a complete biography of the official 
head of the Repubhc, nor indeed to make any further 
allusion to those remarkable events connected with his 
personal history, which preceded his engaging in politi- 
cal affairs, than may be found necessary or expedient for 
the proper elucidation of the subject in hand. 

The story of his youth and maturer manhood, has been 
rescued from the common-place by a number of discreet 
and ingenious biographers, whose productions, based up- 
on the same general facts and tending to a single object, 
have had the effect to popularize and in some measure 
apotheosize one whose later life has attracted such an 
unusual share of public attention. 

But as regards the prominent leadership which fell to 
him in the late unhappy contest of our civil war, General 
Grant is his own biographer, and his chronicles are to be 
found in the record of battles won. 

Neither detraction nor flattery can have the effect to de- 
press or heighten the proud eminence which as a soldier 
ne there achieved ; for whenever and by whomsoever the 
story of the great rebellion shall be told. General Grant 
will continue to be idealized as the central figure in an 
assembly of heroes. And this not so much on account 
of his real merits as a military commander, concerning 



12 INTRODUCTORY. 

which there is certainly room for an honest diversity of 
sentiment, as by reason of the great successes achieved 
by the Union arms under his leadership, which alone 
served to lift him above the heads of all others, and give 
him a prominence before the country which no other 
man had attained. 

Nor can it be said that the Government, or the people 
whom he served, have been at all unmindful of what was 
due to him for services at once so distinguished and ag- 
grandizing. 

That crowning glory of the soldier, the hearty appro- 
bation of his countrymen, has been cheerfully awarded to 
General Grant in unexampled measure. 

Upon the termination of hostilities, he found himself 
with increased rank and its concomitant emoluments, the 
military head of the army, and in this exalted position a 
state of entire independence was assured to him by the 
magnanimous bounty of a number of our wealthy citi- 
zens. Certainly it would seem that nothing more was 
wanting to insure the contentment and satisfy the ambi- 
tion of the most aspiring of men. 

But the evil genius of General Grant, far from permit- 
ting him to rest upon his military laurels, pointed to that 
goal of American statesmen, the White House, and in- 
spired him with an irresistible longing to become its oc- 
cupant. 

One eflect of our civil war, even at the outset, had been 
to disrupt and disorganize existing political parties, so 
that with the restoration of peace, old party lines and dis- 
tinctions had become almost wholly obliterated, and the 
elements of new parties began to form and arrange them- 
selves according as opinions divided upon the avowed 
policy of Government in dealing with questions more or 
less complicated and bewildering, to which the new order 
of things gave rise. 

But every attempt to resurrect the dead issues of the 
pnst.and erect thereon a sentiment of opposition to the war 
and its results, however ingeniously contrived and ably 



INTRODUCTORY. 1 3 

c nducted, proved abortive. It was a subject which the 
m isses of the people thoroughly understood, and no sys- 
tem of reasoning could induce them to unite upon meas- 
ures which had perished with the overthrow of African 
slavery— which had indeed died a violent death, and been 
buried from sight forever with the honors of war. 

Early in 1865, one of the most lamentable events in 
our history — the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — took 
place. An occurrence so honestly regarded and so gen- 
erally mourned as a national calamitj^ could not fail to 
fill the public mind with new causes of apprehension, 
and it became no easy matter for his successor to satisfy 
the demands of a faction which regarded his exercise of 
executive authority as little less than an usurpation. 

It soon became evident that the country was verging 
upon a political crisis, springing out of the still widening 
breach between its chief magistrate and Congress. 

All these combined causes favored the nomination of a 
Presidential candidate who had hitherto maintained a 
neutral position upon all party measures, and such an 
one was to be found in General Grant, who was easily 
prevailed upon to lay aside the sword and assume 
the more devious role of the politician, and it is from his 
first entrance upon this new and untried field that we 
propose to trace, with as much exactitude as the imper- 
fect materials at our command will permit, his subsequent 
career. 

It may not have been so highly complimentary to 
General Grant as might have been desired, that his 
selection as the rallying center of a numerous party was 
without reference to his personal qualifications for the 
discharge of even the commonest functions which per- 
tain to the office of chief magistrate. 

His intermediary ministration as Secretary of War, 
although in the way of his scholastical training and, for 
the most part, life-long pursuits, displayed none of that 
pre-eminent sagacity and tact which a credulously enthu- 
siastic people had ascribed to him. Indeed, the points 



14 INTRODUCTORY. 

of difference which arose between himself and President 
Johnson, as well those of a personal as of a political 
nature, so far as we are able to judge from the published 
correspondence between them, evince a degree of igno- 
rance on the part of General Grant of the principles of 
our civil government, and a recklessness in the statement 
ol facts, in broad and unhappy contrast with the keen 
comprehensiveness of his abler and better informed su- 
perior in office. 

But so far from depreciating the availability of General 
Grant as a candidate for the Presidency, his controversy 
with Mr. Johnson, without regard to its merits, served 
only to add to his popularity, and incline the scale of his 
hitherto equally poised sentiments to the side of the rad- 
icals, by whom he was fairly captured and set up as a 
party idol, before he could complete his negotiations 
with the leaders of the opposition, with whom, and, in 
fact, with both of whom, he had long indulged in a kind 
of political coquetry, wherein the offer of " First come, 
first served," was almost openly made. 

Thenceforward, during his candidacy, the studied reti- 
cence of General Grant upon all questions of public 
interest, was scarcely broken in upon beyond his unqual- 
ified avowal of the " one term principle," a proposition 
simple enough in itself, but in its application to the Chief 
Magistrate, an effectual guard against a train of possible 
evils, almost certain to flow from a selfish, not to say 
corrupt, use of the patronage of that great office, in 
planning and securing for its possessor a re-election. 

A principle thus openly avowed amounts to a solemn 
pledge of its inculcation and practice, and the people 
whose suffrages have elevated to official station the one 
who proclaimed it, are justified now, in insisting upon 
its observance, not alone on account of its general expe- 
diency, but because of the demoralizing tendency of 
the old system as at present illustrated throughout every 
branch of the public service, the recipients of whose 
offices and incomes are dependent upon executive favor. 



CHAPTER II. 

Grant's political views just before and just after the rebellion. — Declares 
himself an anti-Abolitionist. — He makes a tour of observation South. 
— His views of the condition of things there. — Questionable action of 
Congress. — Sound doctrine. — Grant on the fence, — The Tenure of OfHce 
Act. — Grant Secretary of War ad interim. — As a politician, he plays his 
first card. — He snubs the President, and provokes a scathing reply. — . 
His ignorance of public matters. — His understanding with President 
Johnson about resigning his position. — He fails to keep his word. — 
What he said February 3d contrasted with what he said January 28th. — ■ 
Conclusions. 

If we were to be called upon to define the views held 
by General Grant upon those governmental questions 
which properly came under the head of politics, either 
before the breaking out of the rebellion or immediately 
after its close, we should be wholly at a loss what to 
say. 

From all we have been able to gather upon this sub- 
ject, it would appear that he was formerly a democrat of 
the Kansas-Nebraska school ; at all events, we have his 
word for it, that he had availed himself of his privilege 
as a citizen, at a general election, on but a single occa- 
sion, when he voted for James Buchanan for President, 
and, as he expressed no regret at the circumstance, it is 
presumed that the pro-slavery policy of that official met 
with his approval. 

True it is, that, whilst residing in St. Louis, he at one 
time put himself forward as a candidate for city surveyor 
but, in so doing, we may presume that he relied more 
upon his professional acquirements than upon any claims 
of a party nature ; and, in view of the great good for- 
tune which was held in reserve for him, it is, perhaps, a 

(IS) 



l6 DECLARES HIMSELF AN ANTI-ABOLITIONIST. 

lucky circumstance that his endeavors were attended 
with no better success. 

At the outbreak of the rebellion, Congress declared, 
by an almost unanimous vote, that the war should be con- 
ducted solely for the purpose of preserving the Union 
ai.d maintaining the Federal Constitution and laws, with- 
out impairing the dignity, equality and rights of the 
States or of individuals, and that, when these objects 
were accomplished, the war should cease; so that, in ac- 
cepting a commission in the military service of the 
North^ General Grant stood committed to the prosecution 
of the war for the restoration of all the States under our 
Government, but nothing further. That he had no sym- 
pathy with that class of our fellow-citizens, who, being of 
African descent, were then held in bondage by the several 
States in rebellion, is made sufficiently evident by his 
repugnance to being used as an instrumenf: of emancipa- 
tion, through his connection with the army, and his threat 
to carry his sword over to the enemy the moment it 
should become evident to his mind that the abolition of 
negro slavery was one of the ends for which the war was 
to be prosecuted.* 

Beyond this, we look in vain for any decided expres- 
sions of opinion from him upon national topics, until, 
after the re-establishment of peace and order, when the 
freedom of the blacks — that greatest of all the results of 
the prolonged struggle — had become an assured fact, and 
nothing remained to be done but to foot up the accounts 
and settle the status of the rebellious States and their 
peoples, including the political and social relations of the 
freed men. 

When the question of the immediate admission of the 
Southern negroes to a political equality with the whites, 
in all respects, was first agitated at the seat of Govern- 

* The language of General Grant, on the occasion referred to. was, — " I 
am a Democrat, and when I am convinced that the war is waged to prose* 
cute the designs of the abolitionists, I pledge my honor, as a soldier, that 
I will carry my sword on the other side, and cast my lot with that people " 



HIS TOUR OF OBSERVATION SOUTH. \^ 

ment, General Grant expressed himself, without reserve, 
as decidedly opposed to it. We have the evidence of 
ex-Senator Doolittlc that he authorized him to say to the 
people of Wisconsin, whither he was going, " that the 
contemplated reconstruction of the South, upon the base 
of negro suffrage, was an outrage upon all the principles 
of justice or statesmanship, and would eventually result in 
a war of races." 

At a later period. General Grant was induced to make 
a tour of observation into the Southern States, with a 
view to ascertain the disposition of the whites towards 
the Government, and of the two races towards one an- 
other. He visited some of the larger towns, and gathered 
such facts as he was able to do from the different military 
stations in his route, and came home fully impressed with 
the peaceful and accommodating spirit which pervaded 
that mixed and disorganized community.* 

Prostrate and helpless as the South appeared at this 
time, with the better class of her population greatly re- 
duced, her substance wasted, her resources cut off and 
her labor-system destroyed, there was still hope, that, 
under the protection of a friendly government, old ani- 
mosities would be forgotten in the speedy instauration 
of the States lately in revolt, whereby their natural 
resources, alwa)^s abundant, might be developed under a 
system more in harmony with the fraternal elements of 
our nationality. 

But it is evident that General Grant did not then anti- 
cipate the position to be assumed by Congress towards the 
South, so diametrically opposed to the doctrines enunciat- 
ed by that body, when they accepted the alternative of war 
and committed the issues which had been raised by the 
Southern leaders to the arbitrament of arms. Then the 

* See Report of General Grant to Congress in 1866, wherein he says : 
" There is such universal acquiescence in the authority of the General Gov- 
ernment throughout the portions of the Southern States visited by me 
that the mere presence of a military force, without regard to numbers, is 
sufficient to maintain order." 
2 



l8 SOUND DOCTRINE. 

political equality of all the States had never been ques- 
tioned. It was the right only to sever their connection 
with the Central Government which was denied. To 
admit such a right would be to give validity to the ordi- 
nances of secession, and concede, in a single word, all 
that was claimed by the South. And whilst, according 
to the former, and by far more rational view of the ques- 
tion, it must be conceded that the General Government 
was fully authorized in compelling the allegiance of the 
States in revolt, by all the powers at its command, it by 
no means follows that any legal justification is to be 
found for establishing a military government over them 
after their submission. 

It is a sound doctrine, and one which is essential to 
the maintenance of the central power, that the compact 
of the States is indissoluble, and can never be impaired 
or surrendered, either by the individual States, as parts 
of the Integral Government, or by the Government it- 
self; and the obligations of allegiance which this doctrine 
enjoins, apply with equal force to the original or Co- 
lonial States, which, for mutual advantage and protec- 
tion, created the Central Government, by transferring to 
it certain of their independent powers, and investing it 
with sovereignty, and to all the other States which have 
been created by the General Government out of its ter- 
ritories, and invested with the attributes of sovereignty, 
without being in themselves sovereign. 

If the contrary principle were to be admitted, we 
should be forced to concede the legal right of secession 
and the General Government, in effecting the restoration 
of the seceding States through force, instead of being 
in the exercise of its legitimate constitutional powers, 
would be chargeable with their conquest and subjugation. 

So far as we are able to determine, from any acts or 
expressions of General Grant, xt would seem that he held 
lo the former opinion throughout the war ; but when a 
breach became inevitable between Congress and the Ex- 
ecutive, mainly growing out of this very subject, he as- 



TENURE OF OFFICE ACT. I9 

sumed a neutral position, and became, in a measure, the 
official prop of both parties. 

Another thing which seems to have escaped the ob- 
servation of General Grant at this time, regarding the 
future of the South, was, the social and political demor- 
alization which followed in the wake of a class of uncon- 
scionable adventurers from the Northern States, who, tak- 
ing advantage of the disfranchisement of the better class of 
whites, succeeded in gaining the confidence and support 
of the colored voters, through practices and professions 
as abject as they were hypocritical, only to crowd their 
way into offices of trust, and complete the financial ruin 
of States over which they exercised control. 

We shall have more to say upon this head hereafter. 

The Tenure of Office Act was one of personal hostility 
to President Johnson, and had the effect to curtail the 
supervisory powers of the Executive over his subordi- 
nates in office, thereby increasing their independence in 
the ratio of diminishing their accountability to the re- 
sponsible head of the government. 

As to the wisdom and policy of laws which are intend- 
ed to have a mere personal bearing, and serve only to 
tether and hamstring a public officer in the discharge of 
the duties which appertain to his office, nothing need be 
said; but when those laws are in effect a usurpation by 
one of the co-ordinate branches of government, of the 
powers which of right belong to another, the question 
becomes one of the gravest importance. 

Not only Mr. Johnson, but every member of his 
Cabinet, after having formally considered the subject, 
regarded the provisions of the Tenure of Office Act as 
in violation of the constitutional powers of the Execu- 
tive, although the Secretary of War subsequently in- 
trenched himself behind them, in his endeavors to coun- 
teract the designs of the President.* 

* The Senate at first refused to include members of the Cabinet within 
the provisions of this act, but finally consented to it after a conference 
with the House Committee. 



20 GRANT SECRETARY OF WAR, ad hltemiU 

It was this unfortunate disagreement between Presi- 
dent Johnson and one of the ablest of his Cabinet officers, 
which brought General Grant to the front in the new 
character of Secretary of War, ad interim; an office 
which he accepted voluntarily, and not, as it has been 
alleged, by the compulsory orders of his superior. 

In assuming the duties of his new office, General Grant 
took upon himself the responsibilities of a Cabinet officer, 
and became from thence one of the conferrees and advisers 
of Mr. Johnson in all that pertained to his exercise of 
executive powers. 

He was, indeed, one of a political family, to whose 
consideration and judgment the graver questions of state 
were to be submitted. The relation between the Chief 
Magistrate and the several chiefs of bureaus who together 
form his cabinet, is necessarily one of great intimacy and 
confidence, wherein the formal and studied modes of 
communication are laid aside for the more familiar and 
friendly deportment of the drawing-room, and it was 
now and here that the anxiety of General Grant to play 
his first card as a politician led him to enter a formal 
protest to the orders of the Executive which provided 
for the removal of General Sheridan from the command 
of the 5th Military District, a measure which we venture 
to assert, every fair-minded citizen, at all acquainted with 
the extraordinary rule of that officer over the States of 
Louisiana and Texas, most heartily approved. 

In the course of his observations upon the policy of 
the order making this removal, General Grant takes 
occasion to remark as follows : " It is unmistakably the 
expressed wish of the country that General Sheridan 
should not be removed from his present command. This 
is a Republic, where the will of the people is the law of 
the land. I beg that their voice may be heard. General 
Sheridan has performed his civil duties faithfully and 
intelligently ; his removal will only be regarded as an 
effort to defeat the laws of Congress." 

The unsupported assumption of the first sentence 



HE SNUBS THE PRESIDENT. 

which we have quoted above, is only matched by the 
application which is made of the thread-bare aphorism 
which follows it. It was indeed a simple bait to be 
thrown out to a great party ; and yet it was seized upon 
with great avidity by those who conceived that a rup- 
ture with Mr. Johnson would enhance the prospects of 
their candidate for the succession. 

There is nothing which serves in an equal degree to 
obscure the faults and magnify the virtues of one in the 
eyes of the commonalty as that species of heroism which 
springs from military renown, and General Grant was 
exceedingly fortunate at this time in being able to conceal 
his utter unfitness and incapacity in his new relations to 
the Government behind his brilliant achievements in the 
field of arms, which had the effect to suspend the judg- 
ment and disarm the criticism of those who would have 
been less tender towards almost any other individual. 
His resistance to the removal of General Sheridan from 
the command of a Department which he had converted 
into a tyranny as absolute as any in history, was certainly 
bad enough ; but to voluntarily add the stamp of his 
approval to the unwise and disorganizing conduct of that 
officer, and his reckless abuse of the extraordinary powers 
with which he was vested, in dealing with the civil affairs 
of a people over which he was improvidently placed, not 
to mention his studied disrespect towards the President 
of the United States, to whom he was directly answerable 
for his excesses, were more than sufficient, at any other 
period, to draw upon himself a merited rebuke. 

Mr. Johnson, in his reply to General Grant, has shown 
a just appreciation of their differences. He there says : 
" Whilst I am cognizant of the efforts that have been 
made to retain General Sheridan in command of the 5th 
Military District, I am not aware that the question has 
ever been submitted to the people themselves for deter- 
mination." 

In regard to the course of General Sheridan, Mr. 
Johnson remarks : " His rule has been one of absolute 



22 HE RECEIVES A SCATHING REBUKE. 

tyranny, without reference to the principles ol our Gov- 
ernment or the nature of our free institutions. 

" The state of affairs which has resulted from the course 
he has pursued, has seriously interfered with a harmoni- 
ous, satisfactory and speedy execution of the acts of Con- 
gress, and is alone sufficient to justify a change. * * * 
In assuming that it is the expressed wish of the people 
that General Sheridan should not be removed from his 
present command, you remark that ' this is a Republic, 
where the will of the people is the law of the land,' and 
' beg that their voice may be heard.' This, indeed, is a 
Republic, based however, upon a written constitution. 
The Constitution is the combined and expressed will of 
the people, and their voice is best known when reflected 
in the measures which that instrument prescribes. While 
one of its provisions makes the President Commander-in- 
chief of the Army and Navy, another requires that he 
shall take care that the law be faithfully executed."* 

It would seem, from the nature of this correspondence, 
that Mr. Johnson found it expedient to give his week-old 
Secretary some rudimentary lessons in relation to the 
principles which underlie our Government, and at the 
same time to remind him that, by those fundamental 
rules, the President, instead of the Secretary of War, is 
made Commander-in-chief of the Army. 

Nor can it be denied that some instruction in these 
regards might have been given with advantage to one 
who could so far mistake the spirit and just operation of 
our institutions as to insist upon the continued oppres- 
sion of the people of a particular section of the Union, 
because in his judgment the people of the other sections 
were in favor of it, and this, by the most indulgent view, 
is the sum of the argument adduced by General Grant in 
support of the further retention of Sheridan as Comman- 
der of the 5th Military District, and which, if true, re- 
flects as little credit upon the disposition of the populace 

* See letter of General Grant to President Joiinson, dated August 17th, 
1867, and the reply of Mr. Johnson thereto of August 19th. 



AGREES TO RESIST STANTON'S RE-IN STATEMENT. 23 

as upon the wisdom and fairness of General Grant in so 
recreantly yielding to their prejudices.* 

We pass to the final act of General Grant's Secretary- 
ship, which was terminated by his surrender of the office 
to Mr. Stanton, after the refusal of the Senate to concur 
in his removal, the causes of which, it would appear, 
were not satisfactory to that body. Whatever these 
causes may have been we shall not pause to inquire, in- 
asmuch as they have no direct bearing upon the ques- 
tions in hand. 

It is certain, however, that President Johnson, who 
regarded the Tenure of Office Act with no favor, as 
having a personal, rather than a general significance, was 
anxious to test its constitutionality before the only tribu- 
nal empowered to pass upon that question. For this 
special object the President requested General Grant, as 
Secretary of War ad interim, to resist the re-instatement 
of Mr. Stanton, and thus campel him to resort to the 
courts for his repossession of the office, by which means 
the constitutionality of the act in question might be 
brought to a judicial determination ; or in case General 
Grant had any misgivings about standing in such a posi- 
tion, he was requested to resign the office into other 
hands in time to permit this plan to be carried out. 

To this arrangement General Grant yielded a ready 
assent, and the President, secure in the belief that it 
would be faithfully adhered to, gave himself no further 
concern about the matter. It is not strange, therefore, 
that, after all this, the President received, with no little 
surprise and indignation, the subsequent notification that 
the War Office had been quietly given up to Mr. Stanton, 
without so much as a verbal protest against his re-occu- 

* In issuing the order of his Department for the removal of General 
Sheridan, it was so framed by General Grant as to carry upon its face the 
evidence that it was done at the dictation of the Executive, as if to disarm 
in advance any censure* which might attach to himself for doing that 
which he could only do as a subordinate, and for which he was in no wis 
responsible. 



24 HE FAILS TO KEEP HIS WORD. 

pation of it, thus depriving him of the means of submit 
ting in a legal form the constit^itionality of the Tenure o 
Office Act to the Judicial Department of the Government; 
and setting at rest the graver questions to which the act 
gave rise. 

We confess that, in assuming the foregoing statement 
of the case to be true, we have followed the clear and 
succinct narration of Mr. Johnson,* supported and af- 
firmed by the several members of his Cabinet, who had 
personal knowledge of what had occurred, rather than 
single, unsupported, floundering and altogether impro- 
bable version of General Grant, respecting the matters 
under review, to be found in his published communica- 
tions to the President of January 28th and February 3d, 
1868, and which, for contradictory statements, shallow- 
ness of reasoning, absence of all due respect and down- 
right impudence, stand unrivalled in the whole catalogue 
of State Papers ; and yet there were people enough to 
be found so bitter in their opposition to the policy of the 
administration, and so personally hostile to Mr. Johnson, 
as to commend the worst features of this graceless cor- 
respondence. 

We have alluded to the intimate and confidential rela- 
tions which of necessity exist between the' President and 
the members of his Cabinet, who, by the acceptance of 
their respective offices, consent to become the conferrees 
and advisers of the President upon all the more impor- 
tant measures of his administration. 

With what a sense of shame, then, must every fair- 
minded citizen recall the self-condemning admissions of 
General Grant in his letter of February 3d, wherein 
the following statement occurs : " You must have known 
that my greatest objection to his (Mr. Stanton's) re- 
moval, was the fear that some one would be appointed 
in his stead, who would, by opposition to the laws relat- 
ing to the restoration of the Southern States to their 

* See letters of Mr. Johnson to General Grant of January 31st and Feb. 
ruary loth, 1868, with corroborating statements of Cabinet officers. 



TWO LETTERS OF HIS COMPARED. 



25 



proper relation to the Government, embarrass the army 
in the performance of the duties especially imposed upon 
it by the laws ; and that it was to prevent such an appoint- 
ment that I accepted the appointment of Secretary of War, 
AD INTERIM, and not for the purpose of enabling you to get 
rid of Mr. Stanton, or by withholding it from him in opposi- 
tion to the law, or not doing so myself, surrender to one who, 
as the statements and assumptions in your communication 
plainly indicate, was sought," {Sic.) 

Now let us contrast this statement with the one which 
is contained in the communication of General Grant to 
the President, of January 28th, from which we make the 
following quotation : " Some time after I assumed the 
duties of Secretary of War ad interim, the President 
asked my views as to the course Mr. Stanton ivould have to 
pursue, in case the Senate should not concur in his suspension, 
to obtain possession of his office. My reply was in substance, 
that Mr. Stanton zvould have to appeal to the courts to re-in- 
state him, illustrating my position by citing the grounds I had 
taken in the case of the Baltimore Police Commissioners. In 
that case I did not doubt the technical right of Governor 
Swan, to remove the old Commissioners, and to appoint 
their successors as the old Commissioners refused to give 
up. However, I contended that no resource was left 
but to appeal to the courts. I had not looked particu- 
larly into the Tenure of Office Bill, but that what I had 
stated was a general principle." 

It may well be asked, why, and on account of what 
obstacle to his free admission, was it that Mr. Stanton 
was to be compelled to resort to the Courts to obtain 
possession of his office, in case the Senate should refuse 
to concur in his removal ? 

Certainly, there could have been no question for the 
Courts to determine, and no ground for judicial inter- 
ference of any sort, if, as General Grant would have us 
believe, he was to quietly surrender his office, upon the 
demand of Mr. Stanton, and however anxious we might 
be, to cover his retreat from the position he first assumed, 



26 GRANT AND JOHNSON. 

a common regard for truth compels us to admit that his 
two statements are wholly irreconcilable ; but so far as 
they go towards sustaining either of his shifting positions, 
the leaning is obviously to the side of Mr. Johnson. 

All his prattle about the law of Congress affords but a 
thin covering for his infirmity of reasoning, when it is 
considered that it was the Constitution under which Mr. 
Johnson endeavored to shelter himself from the crippling 
effects of that law, whose superior powers could only be 
called into requisition by the fidelity of his ad interim 
Secretary of War, which gave way at the last moment. 



CHAPTER III. 

President Johnson's order to his new Secretary. — Grant's reply. — The 
President's alleged " misrepresentations "proven. — Exhaustive summing 
up of President Johnson. — He is supported by the other members of 
his Cabinet.— Grant retreats. — He backs out of the War OfBce, and 
thus proclaims his own treachery. — President Jefferson's course in a 
similar case. — Was it hypocrisy or falsehood ? — Grant becomes a Radi- 
cal at last. — Jesse declares Ulysses to be a conservative. — President John- 
son's Western tour. — Grant's connection with it. — He is still in doubt 
which way to jump. — His opinion of the eflFects on the South of Presi- 
dent Johnson's acquittal. — Thaddeus Stevens's opinion. — Grant declares 
in favor of universal suflFrage. — His sudden conversion. — His habits 
and venality. — His pledges and references to his record. — What about 
his treatment of the Jews? 

It is a trite saying, that " he who has inj'ured his 
friend is the last to forgive him." 

The conduct of General Grant towards Mr. Johnson, 
from the date of their first disagreement, of which the 
preceding chapter treats, was that of a bitter opponent 
as regards the policy of his administration, and of per- 
sonal enmity individuall)^ 

It was after his surrender of the War Office that the 
President, for certain prudential reasons, which, from the 
position of non-intercourse maintained by Mr. Stanton, 
it certainly was not unreasonable for him to indulge, 
directed General Grant verbally, " Not to obey any 
order from the War Department assumed to be issued 
by the direction of the President, unless such order was 
known by the General commanding the Armies of the 
United States to have been authorized by the Executive." 

In response to this verbal direction. General Grant 
relieved his overburdened mind by a lengthy com- 
munication, to which allusion has been heretofore made, 
in the course of which he repeated a former request, to 

(»7) 



28 GRANT REPLIES TO THE PRESIDENT. 

the eflfect that the instructions of the President should 
be given in writing, and avowed his purpose to disregard 
them until so given. " I am compelled to ask these in- 
structions in writing," wrote the General, " in conse- 
quence of the many gross misrepresentations affecting 
my personal honor, circulated through the press, pur- 
porting to come from the President, of conversations 
which occurred either with the President privately in 
his office, or in Cabinet meeting." 

To this labored communication the President made no 
further response at that time than to transmit the written 
instructions required of him, which drew from General 
Grant the following most remarkable rejoinder : 

" Head-Quarters Army of the United States, ) 
Washington, Jan. 30, 1868. f 

" His Excellency, Andrew Johnson, President of the 
United States : 

" Sir. — I have the honor to acknowledge the return of 
my note of the 24th inst., with your endorsement thereon, 
' that I am not to obey any order from the War Depart- 
ment, assumed to be issued by direction of the President, 
unless such order is known by me to have been author- 
ized by the Executive,' and in reply thereto to say, that I 
am informed by the Secretary of War that he has not 
received from the Executive any order or instructions 
limiting or impairing his authority to issue orders \o the 
army as has heretofore been his practice under the law 
and custom of the department. While his authority 
to the War Department is not countermanded, it will be 
satisfactory evidence to me that any orders issued from 
the War Department, by direction of the President, are 
authorized by the Executive. 

" I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obe- 
dient servant, . ^ 5^ ^^^^^^ Generair 

The spirit of insubordination here manifested received 
a merited rebuke from the Executive, who for a second 
time found it necessary to remind his refractory corres- 
pondent that the President of the United States was the 



THE PRESIDENT S " MISREPRESENTATIONS PROVEN. 29 

Commander-in-chief of the army, and as such, had 
power to enforce not alone obedience to his orders, but 
" good conduct and military discipline " on the part of 
his subordinates. 

The alleged " misrepresentations affecting his honor," 
of which General Grant complains in his communica- 
tion of January 28th, with hints of their having origin- 
ated with the President and his Cabinet, have, unfortu- 
nately for him, been proven by the most conclusive 
evidence to be true ; and it is only just to say that an 
appreciative public will accord to him the full benefit of 
his own estimate of their importance by agreeing with 
him that they do most seriously affect his personal honor ! 

The exhaustive summing up of Mr. Johnson, which 
terminated this controversy, will be found in his com- 
munication to General Grant, under date of February 
loth, to which are appended the affirmatory notes of the 
Honorable the Secretaries of the Navy, of the Treas- 
ury, of the Interior, and that of the Postmaster General. 

After pushing the General of the Armies from one 
after another of his stand-points, and fairly intrenching 
himself in his position, as regards his conferences with 
that officer at the Executive chambers, President Johnson 
turned to a more recent communication upon the sub- 
ject of orders from the War Department, upon which 
he remarks : 

" I will only notice one more statement in your letter 
of the 3d instant, that the performance of the promises 
which it is alleged were made by you would have in- 
volved you in the resistance of law. I know of no 
statute that would have been violated had you, carrying 
out your promises in good faith, tendered your resigna- 
tion when you concluded not to be made a party in any 
legal proceedings. You add, ' I am in a measure con^ 
firmed in this conclusion by your recent orders, directing 
me to disobey orders from the Secretary of War, my 
superior and your subordinate, without having counter- 
manded his authority to issue the orders I am to diso- 
bey.' On the 24th ult. you addressed a note to the 



30 



THE PRESIDENT SUMS UP HIS CASE. 



President, requesting in writing an order given you ver- 
bally, five days before, to disregard orders from Mr. 
Stanton, as Secretary of War, until you knew from the 
President himself that they were his orders. On the 
29th, in compliance with your request, I did give you 
instructions in writing not to obey any order Irom the 
War Department, assumed to be issued by the direction 
of the President, unless such order is known by the 
General commanding the armies of the United States to 
have been authorized by the Executive. There are some 
orders which a Secretary of War may issue without the 
authority of the President. There are others which he 
issues simply as the agent of the President, and which 
purport to be by direction of the President. For such 
orders the President is responsible, and he should there- 
fore know and understand what they are before giving 
such direction. Mr. Stanton states in his letter of the 
4th inst, which accompanies the published correspon- 
dence, that he has had no correspondence with the Pres- 
ident since the 12th of August last ; and he further says 
that, since he resumed the duties of the office, he has 
continued to discharge them without any personal or 
written communication with the President ; and he adds, 
no orders have been issued from this department in the 
name of the President, with my knowledge, and I have 
received no orders from him. 

" It thus seems that Mr. Stanton now discharges the 
duties of the War Department without any reference to 
the President, and without using his name. My order 
to you had only reference to orders assumed to be issued 
by the President. It would appear, from Mr. Stanton's 
letter, that you have received no such order from him. 
In your note to the President, of the 13th ultimo, in 
which you acknowledge the receipt of the written order 
of the 29th, you say that you have been informed by 
Mr. Stanton that he has not received any order limiting 
his authority to issue orders to the army according to 
the practice of the department, and state that, * while 
this authority to the War Department is not counter 
manded, it will be satisfactory evidence to me that any 
orders issued from the War Department, by direction of 
the President, are authorized by the Executive.' The 
President issues an order to you to obey no order from 
the War Department, purporting to be made ' by the di- 
rection of the President,' until you have referred it to 



GRANT SILENCED. 3 1 

him for his approval. You reply that you have received 
the President's order, and will not obey it, but will obey 
an order purporting to be given by his direction, ' if it 
comes from the War Department.' You will obey no 
direct order of the President, but will obey his indirect 
order. If, as you say, there has been a practice in the 
War Department to issue orders -in the name of the 
President, without his direction, does not the precise 
order you have requested and have received, change the 
practice as to the General of the Army ? Could not the 
President countermand any such order issued to you 
from the War Department ? If you should receive an 
order from that department, issued in the name of the 
President, to do a special act, and an order directly from 
the President himself not to do the act, is there a doubt 
which you are to obey ? You answer the question when 
)''Ou say to the President in your letter of the 3d inst., 
* the Secretary of War is my superior and your subordi- 
nate ;' and yet you refuse obedience to the superior out 
of deference to the subordinate ! 

" Without further comment upon the insubordinate 
attitude which you have assumed, I am at a loss to know 
how you can relieve yourself from the orders of the 
Presiaent, who is made by the Constitution the Com- 
mander-in-chief of the Army and Navy, and is therefore 
the official superior as well of the General of the Army 
as of the Secretary of War." 

Of this convincing exposition of his own duplicity and 
insubordination, General Grant has never attempted a 
refutation. So long, indeed, as the points of difference 
between the President and himself were narrowed down 
to a mere question of veracity between the two, he was 
impudently bold in parading his own version of them 
before the public, relying, it may be presumed, to a very 
great extent, upon his personal popularity to turn the 
tide of public sympathy to his side. But when he found 
that his inconsiderate allusion to Cabinet conferences 
had had the unexpected effect to rally the several mem- 
bers of his Cabinet to the support of the President, he 
drew his lion's skin about him and retreated to his 
quarters. 

He who had been so ready to address the President of 



32 HE BACKS OUT OF THE WAR OFFICE. 

the United States in the course of his self-convicting 
rigmarole, with the vulgar insolence of words like these, 
" I re-assert the correctness of my statements in that let- 
ter (January 28th), anything in yours in reply to it to the 
contrary, notwithstanding;" had nothing further to offer, 
not even an apology. 

It was only just previous to Mr. Stanton's re-instate- 
ment that Grant had promised to observe the wishes of 
the President, and either to resist its consummation or, 
in case he should prefer not to be a party to a legal proce- 
dure, in this connection, to resign his place to another, upon 
whose official stamina the President could more surely 
rely, and in order that there should be no mistaking his 
true position, it was arranged that he should hold a further 
conference with the President at the Executive Mansion 
the Monday following, but this agreement was never kept. 

The next that was known of him he had pliantly given 
up the War Office to its former incumbent, without so 
much as a protest against its re-occupation. Subse- 
quently, when Mr. Johnson arraigned him for his infi- 
delity, before the members of his Cabinet, he sought to 
shield his offence under the cover of a pretended misun- 
derstanding ; but last of all he declared, without shame, 
that his official treachery had been purposed and planned 
from the beginning, and that his quasi compliance with 
the wishes of the President was only the false covering 
of a hypocrite. 

Mr. Johnson has been severely censured by a partisan 
press for his resistance to the Tenure of Office Act, and 
whilst it is no purpose of ours to defend the actions of 
one so capable of defending himself, it certainly will not 
be out of place to present the opinions and conduct of 
one of our country's most revered statesmen, in a similar 
emergency. We quote from a letter of Thomas Jefferson 
to Edward Livingston, U. S. District Attorney for New 
York, dated November ist, 1801 : 

" The President is to have the laws executed. He may order an 



THROWS HIMSELF INTO THE ARMS OF THE RADICALS. 33 

offence, then, to be prosecuted. If he sees a prosecution put into a 
train which is not lawful, he may order it to be discontinued, and put 
into legal train. I found a prosecution going on against Duane for an 
offence against the Senate, founded on the Sedition Act. / affirm that 
act to be no law^ because in opposition to the Constitution, and 1 
shall treat it as a nullity whenever it comes in the way of my func- 
tionsy 

At the date of this letter the law in question had never 
been set aside by the Supreme Court, hence Mr. Jeffer- 
son acted solely upon his own judgment in assuming it to 
be unconstitutional, and treating it as void. 

Will not the people accord to Mr. Johnson a right 
which has the sanction of this high authority? Does 
General Grant still hold to the opinion that the Executive 
is bound to execute an obnoxious law, which he honestly 
believes to be unconstitutional and void, before bringing 
it to a judicial test ? If this be so, either General Grant 
or Thomas Jefferson has greatly mistaken the official 
duty of 'the Executive. 

After his quarrel with Mr. Johnson, General Grant 
threw himself headlong into the arms of the Radicals. 
Indeed, in view of his Presidential aspirations, there was 
then no other place for him to go. If we are to beheve 
the statements of those who knew him best, he took on 
his new faith reluctantly, and it was obvious enough that 
the Radicals received him with a good deal of misgiv- 
ing. 

Not a few of the representative men of the party, but 
were dissatisfied with the equivocal attitude in which he 
had placed himself in his last disreputable fling at Mr. 
Johnson. Taking his correspondence as a whole, they 
saw clearly enough that it was susceptible of only one 
of two interpretations. If, as he says in his letter of 
February 3d, he accepted the place of a Cabinet Officer 
with the deliberate intention of making use of his posi- 
tion to thwart rather than to assist the measures of the 
administration regarding Mr. Stanton, and the employ- 
iTjent of the military forces under his direction, he was 
3 



34 HIS NEW DEPARTURE. 

guilty of the worst hypocrisy and deceit. If, on the 
other hand, he did not accept that office with any such 
intention, as it would seem from his letter of January 
28th, he was guilty of deliberate falsehood. There was 
no avoiding a conclusion against himself which was to be 
derived from his own contradictory statements ; but even 
when they come to be weighed against the comprehensive 
version of the President and the corroborating testimony 
of his Cabinet, they must be taken at a ruinous discount. 

But the personal unpopularity of Mr. Johnson with 
the Radicals had reached such a pitch, that no higher bid 
for their favor could possibl}'' be made than to oppose, 
with any amount of insolence, his reconstruction policy, 
wherein he urged the restoration of political rights to 
all classes of citizens in the States theretofore in rebellion, 
and the full representation of those States in both houses 
of Congress.* 

We can only account for the position assumed by 
General Grant in his February letter upon the hypothesis 
that, having at length resolved upon carrying his uniform 
over to the Radicals, just as he threatened once before to 
carry his sword over to the rebels, he saw the impor- 
tance of strengthening its availability, by fixing as early 
a date to his conversion as possible. 

At all events, it is well established that, up to the 
period of his ad interim Secretaryship, his sympathies 
were with the policy and aims of the Administration of 
Mr. Johnson. 

An autograph letter from him to Postmaster General 

* In his message to Congress, of December, 1867, Mr. Johnson, in re- 
marking upon the state of the country, says : " There is no Union as our 
fathers understood the term, and as they meant it to be understood by us. 
The Union which they established can exist only where all the States are 
represented in both houses of Congress ; when one State is as free as an- 
other to regulate its internal concerns according to its own will, and when 
the laws of the Central Government, strictly confined to matters of National 
Jurisdiction, apply with equal force to all the people of every section." 

This, unless »ve are greatly mistaken, is the precise ground occupied by 
the Liberal Republican and Democratic parties of to-day. 



JESSE ON ULYSSES. 35 

Randall, in 1866, asking the displacement of George N 
McLellan, Second Assistant Postmaster General, and 
the appointment of General Giles A. Smith in his place, 
urges that McLellan be removed on account of his well- 
known Radicalism^ and opposition to Presidejtt Johnson, and 
at the same time alleges, in behalf of Gen. Smith, that 
he was " a conservative, and would add much strength 
to Mr. Johnson's administration." 

It was in July of the same year, that the father of Gen- 
eral Grant, whom we must believe to have been familiar 
with the political views of his distinguished son, in 
writing to E. C. Collins, Esq., says of the General, that, 
" he could not well stand the trial of being a candidate 
for Republican fav6rs," and this not on account of his 
Conservatism, but of his Democracy, which would indicate 
that the war had wrought but little change in his opin- 
ions, beyond the undermining of his pro-slavery pro- 
clivities. These clung to him to the very last, as has 
been demonstrated by his official order of August nth, 
1862, forbidding the officers and soldiers under his com- 
mand from " enticing slaves to leave their masters," 
although it was a part of the system of Southern warfare 
to impress them into building defensive works, which 
Northern troops were forced to surmount. He testified 
before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in 1865, that he 
was in favor of President Johnson's reconstruction policy, 
and of his North Carolina Proclamation, wherein the 
President declared the Constitutional right of the States 
to decide the suffrage question each for itself, without 
Federal interference.* 

* It was the policy of Congress to cause the South to undergo a proba. 
tionary period, before being allowed an official representation in that body 
and such representation was denied by the house bill of December nth 
1866, which passed the Senate in February, i858. The month following 
the first reconstruction act passed, which declared that no legal govern, 
ments existed in ten of the States of this Union, viz., East Virginia, North 
Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas 
Arkansas and Mississippi. 

By this act, and others which followed it, the above States were divided 



36 GRANT IN A TADPOLE STATE. 

Indeed, the political and social relations existing be- 
tween General Grant and President Johnson were cor- 
dial enough until after the return of the President from 
his western tour, in which the General participated as 
one of his attendants. 

In the course of this remarkable journey, General 
Grant shared in the honors which were accorded to the 
distinguished party, side by side with Mr. Johnson ; and 
at a place of public entertainment in Cincinnati, he was 
fairly badgered into making a speech, which consisted of 
a kind of self-negation politically, and a few rambling, in- 
coherent laudations of the President. 

At this period General Grant was in a kind of tadpole 
state. He would be a Democrat, if wanted to head the 
party ticket — or a Republican on the same terms. We 
have the evidence of some very distinguished men, that 
he was in treaty with the fuglemen of both parties at the 
same time, with the accommodating mood of becoming 
the candidate of whichever exhibited the fullest rolls. 

In the meantime his decision was hastened by the 
action of the mass-meeting of citizens held at the Cooper 
Institute, in the City of New York in December, at 
which he was put in nomination for the Presidency. 
From thence he began to show strong symptoms of Re- 
publicanism, and the putting forth of his radical appen- 
dages was watched with intense interest by the whole 
party. These were pronounced to be of the right sort, 
after his open rupture with Mr. Johnson, whom to revile 
was a praiseworthy act in the estimation of those who 
had set up an irresponsible military despotism in the 

into five military districts, and placed under military rule, with almost un- 
limited powers in the district commanders, even to the infliction of death, 
oa approval of the President ; nor were these commanders, their subor- 
dinates and appointees, bound by "any opinion of any civil officer in the 
United States." 

It would be curious to know what commentaries the historian of even 
balf a century hence will feel called upon to make upon laws like these, 
whereby the civil powers of the Government are subordinated to the mill* 
.ary, in open disregard of the Constitutional inhibition. 



HE IS WORKING TO CONVICT THE PRESIDENT. 37 

South, and cut off the means of escape by denying the 
right of trial by jury and the writ of habeas corpus. 

During the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson 
before the Senate, General Grant, not content with being 
an interested observer, followed his baser instincts, and 
labored with most unbecoming zeal to procure a con- 
viction ostensibly upon political grounds, but really out 
of personal malice. 

We have the authority of that most influential and 
persistent advocate of impeachment, the New York 
Tribune, for saying that the impeachment trial of Mr. 
Johnson was a ''political trial,''^ and that General Grant 
had stated it as his conviction that " the acquittal of Mr. 
Johnson would threaten the country, and especially the 
South, with revolution and bloodshed." — [N. Y. Daily 
Tribune of April 3d and May 15th, 1868.] 

The same statement is contained in a letter from Mr. 
Charles E. Moss, which was honored with a public reading 
before an anti-slavery assemblage in New York, wherein 
he says, " General Grant is working hard among his 
friends to secure his (Johnson's) conviction. He says 
his acquittal will result in bloodshed." The same letter 
imparted still further information, in these words, " Gen- 
eral Grant has declared in favor of universal suffrage in 
the past two weeks, and says this must be the ruling idea 
of his administration, if elected in 1868." 

This latter declaration shows that General Grant had 
undergone a sudden conversion upon the subject of negro 
suffrage, which must have been attended with an entire 
change of heart in that relation. 

* The late Thaddeus Stevens is reported to have said that if impeachmen* 
should not prevail, the Radicals would carry only two Northern States in 
the ensuing election, Senator Trumbull, in his remarks at the time of 
giving in his vote, commented severely upon the revolutionary spirit which 
prevailed outside of the Senate, and said of the real issue to be determined 
by that body, "The question to be decided is not whether Andrew Johnson 
is a proper person to fill the Presidential office, nor whether it is fit that he 
should remain in it, nor, indeed, whether he has violated the Constitution 
and laws in other respects than those alleged against him." 



38 HE IS NOMINATED FOR PRESIDENT. 

Looking" forward to his nomination, he seized upon a 
popular sentiment with the avidity of a practiced dema- 
gogue, and emphatically declared, " that the liberties of 
the country cannot be maintained without a one-term 
amendment to the Constitution." 

By these and similar professions, he succeeded in mak- 
ing himself so acceptable to the Radicals, that little 
remained for the Chicago Convention to do, besides cast- 
ing a pre-determined vote, and announcing their candi- 
date. 

Before the action of the Convention was formally com- 
municated to him, General Grant received the compli- 
ment of a serenade in recognition of his new honors. 
To those who had met for this object he made a short 
address, in which he virtually accepted the nomination 
in these words, " All I can say is, in whatever place you 
assign me, I will endeavor to discharge the duties de- 
volving on me impartially, and to the best of my abili- 
ties. I can only refer you to the record I have left." 

In due time General Grant was officially notified of 
his nomination, and in response thereto he said, " I shall 
have no policy to enforce against the will of the people." 

We forbear to speak of the platform adopted by the 
nominating Convention, as its candidate made no allusion 
to it in his acceptance, nor did he afterwards appear to 
hold it in any particular regard. But to sum up all he 
promised as indicative of his future course, it amounts to 
this : 

1st. To discharge his public duties impartially, and to 
the best of his abilities ; 

2d. To have no policy of his own to enforce ; 

3d. Not to oppose the will of the people. 

And as a guarantee of his future efficiency and good 
faith in these regards, he referred to his past record. 
How then did that record stand ? Shall we judge of his 
impartiahty by his order of December, 1862, expeUing 
the Jews as a class from his military district, on pain of 
imprisonment, and this on twenty -four hours' notice, with, 



WHAT IS HIS RECORD? 



39 



out leave to communicate with his Headquarters ? Was 
a whole race to be condemned because some of that race 
had disregarded the mandate of the General ? 

If General Grant seriously pointed to the record of 
his past life, as affording any promise of what was to be 
reasonably expected of him, in case he should receiv^e by 
an election the office to which he aspired, that unfortu- 
nate allusion must have cruelly dwarfed the expectations 
oi those who were at all familiar with his antecedents. 

His habit of intoxication, which he took on in early 
life, and has never given up, was well understood. 

His selfish venality was equally to be deplored. His 
ignorance of Constitutional law and the plainest princi- 
ples of our Government, had been shown in his contro- 
versy with Mr. Johnson. His hypocrisy and deceitful- 
ness had been made equally evident in the Stanton diffi- 
culty. 

But we are anticipating what belongs to another chap- 
ter. 



CHAPTER IV. 

An instance of Grant's petty spleen towards Mr. Johnson. — Extracts from 
his inaugural address. — How he kept his pledges. — His Cabinet ap- 
pointments. — The example of Tacitus.— The difference between his 
course and that of Grant. — Nepotism. — List of his relatives appointed 
to office.— Opinions of former Presidents on this subject. Nomination 
of Mr. Stewart. — Statutes against detachments of army officers upon 
civil services. — "What General Slocum said.— Grant's military secretaries 
holding civil appointments contrary to law. 

Courtly and imposing as are wont to be the inaugu- 
ral ceremonies of the incoming President of the United 
States, those of March 4, 1869, were sadly marred by the 
petty spleen manifested by General Grant toward Mr. 
Johnson, in his refusal to comply with a custom of no 
ordinary beauty and significance, whereby the President 
elect has been used to proceed to the place of ceremony 
side by side with his immediate predecessor. 

Did General Grant suppose that by indulging in this 
revengeful exhibition he would be able to excite any 
other feelings than those of pity and contempt, on the 
part of the more temperate of his fellow-citizens ? 

Was he fearful that his presence in the same carriage 
with Mr. Johnson, would confer upon the latter any un- 
merited honor or in any manner compromise himself? 

We think we can discern the future with sufficient ac- 
curacy to predict that the day is not far distant when the 
administration of General Grant will only suffer by a 
comparison with that of his predecessor, even as he has 
himself suffered in manhood and honor, by the kindliest 
estimate of his personal conduct towards Mr. Johnson. 

The inaugural address of the new President had evi- 
dently been prepared with a view to quieting the public 
(40) 



EXTRACTS FROM GRANT'S INAUGURAL. 4I 

mind upon a number of agitating topics. He had been 
accused of having no policy, from words which seemed 
to imply as much, in his letter accepting his nomination, 
and he took especial care to set himself right in that par- 
ticular by the following declaration, *' I shall on all sub- 
jects have a policy to recommend — none to enforce 
against the will of the people." 

In allusion to the mineral treasures of the far West, 
he says, " Ultimately it may be necessary to increase the 
facilities to reach these riches, and it may be necessary 
also, that the general government should give all its aid 
to secure their access, but that should only be when a dol- 
lar of obligation to pay secures precisely the same sort of dol- 
lar in use now, and not before^' {sic) "It will be my 

endeavor," he continued, " to execute all laws in good 
faith, to collect all revenues assessed and to have them 

properly disbursed." "■ I tvill to the best of my ability 

appoint to office only those who will carry out this design'' 

In regard to his foreign policy, he remarked, " I would 
protect the law-abiding citizen, whether of native or for- 
eign birth, wherever his rights are jeopardized, or the 
flag of our country floats." 

We shall see how faithfully these pledges have been 
kept. The announcement of his cabinet officers by the 
President, which had been looked forward to with unu- 
sual interest, was received with an equal degree of sur- 
prise. His known inexperience in the affairs of state, 
and his evident want of familiarity with the Constitu- 
tion and laws he was called upon to execute, naturally 
enough led to a conviction, that the new incumbent 
would avail himself of the counsel of such as were most 
distinguished among their fellow-men for those accom- 
phshments which would be brought into immediate requi- 
sition in the civil administration of the government ; but 
with scarcely an exception, the men who were honored 
with seats in the council-chamber of the Executive, were 
men of no previous acquaintance with their new minis- 
trations, and, in more than one instance, almost wholly 



42 THE EXAMPLE OF TACITUS. 

unknown to the country. A course of action at such 
variance with previous examples, led to a good deal of 
speculation as to the causes which operated to bring 
into positions requiring the practical ability of statesmen, 
men who had hitherto confined their efforts to the en- 
largement of their own private fortunes, and were known 
only in the ranks of successful tradesmen ! 

But a solution of this riddle was arrived at when it 
came to be known that out of the five heads of depart- 
ments, three at least drew the attention of the Executive 
to their superior qualifications, by the convincing testi- 
monial of princely gifts ! 

When the good Tacitus, from his place as first among 
the Senators, was elevated by the choice of his col- 
leagues and the suffrages of the Roman people to the 
highest office in the empire, he bequeathed the whole of 
his ample patrimony to his country, to be expended in 
the public service, leaving to his countrymen, at the close 
of his honored reign, the example of a pure life, and to 
his descendants the sole legacy of a revered name. 

But when General Grant secured to himself the office 
of President of the United States, he gathered his rela- 
tions, retainers and personal favorites about him, and be- 
stowed upon them places of honor and profit in the pub- 
lic service, with less regard for their real merit and per- 
sonal qualifications than to a purpose of rewarding such 
as had won their way to his favor by the insinuations of 
flattery or the seducing allurements of riches. Not alone 
were the heads of departments selected from among 
those who had been particularly active heretofore in pro- 
moting the personal and pecuniary interests of the Pres- 
ident, but the same is true of nearly all the more promi- 
nent and lucrative offices at his disposal. 

The personal fitness of the candidate is of minor con- 
sideration, if he is only able to show a handsome footing 
upon the subscription list ! 

Added to this is the shameless practice of nepotism — a 
practice which has been censured and pointedly con- 



GRANT S NEPOTISM. 43 

demned by the very founders of the Republic — nepotism 
by wJiolesale, from the center to the remotest border ; at 
home, abroad and upon the seas. Great Grants and lit- 
tle Grants, old Dents and young Dents, father, father-in- 
1 , w, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews, first cousins, 
second, third, fourth cousins ; the list is a stigma and a 
reproach in the eyes of all considerate men.* 

In alluding to this subject. General Washington said : 

" So far as I know my own mind, I would not be in 
the remotest degree influenced in making nominations 
by motives arising from the ties of family or blood." 

* The subjoined is, we believe, a correct list of President Grant's near 
relations in office by his appointment, except in the instances of the Gen- 
eral's father and son, who were appointed by Mr. Johnson, at his solicita- 
tion, doubtless, and have been retained under his administration, which 
amounts to the same thing. If to these be added all those more remotely 
connected, the list would be largely increased. Some have estimated the 
number as high as forty : 

Jesse ^oot Grant, President's father. Postmaster at Covington, Ky. 

Rev. M. J. Cramer, President's brother-in-law, Minister to Denmark. 

Brevet Brig.-Gen. F. T. Dent, President's brother-in-law. Chief Usher at 
the Executive Mansion. 

George W. Dent, President's brother-in-law. Appraiser of Customs, San 
Francisco. 

John Dent, President's brother-in-law, Indian Trader for New Mexico, 
under Indian Bureau ; place worth $100,000 a year. 

James F. Casey, President's brother-in-law. Collector of the Port of New 
Orleans ; place worth $30,000 a year. 

Alexander Sharpe, President's brother-in-law, Marshal of the District of 
Columbia. 

Silas Hudson, President's own cousin. Minister to Guatemala. 

Orlando H. Ross, President's own cousin, clerk in the Third Auditor's 
office, Washington. 

Peter Casey, President's brother-in-law's own brother, Postmaster at 
Vicksburg, Miss. 

Frederick Dent Grant, President's son. Second Lieutenant Fourth Cav- 
airy. 

S. T. Lambert, M. D., second cousin of the President, Receiver of Public 
Moneys in Oregon. 

Alexander Sharpe, Jr., son of President's brother-in-law, cadet at Annap- 
olis. 



44 THE OPINIONS OF THE EARLIER PRESIDENTS 

And again he has told us that the aims of a public offi- 
cer should be — 

" To discharge the duties of office with that impartial- 
ity and zeal for the public good which ought never to 
suffer connections of blood or friendship to mingle so p 
to have the least sway on decisions of a public nature." 

Thomas Jefferson, upon the same subject, says ; 

" The resolution you so properly approved had long 
been formed in my mind. The public will never be 
made to believe that an appointment of a relative is made 
on the ground of merit alone, uninfluenced by family 
views ; nor can they ever see with approbation offices, the dis- 
posal of IV J lie J I they intrust to the Presidents for public pur- 
poses, divided ont as family property." 

Even after he had retired from the Presidency, Mr. 
Jefferson, in speaking of that high office, wrote to one of 
his kinsmen as follows : 

" Toward acquiring the confidence of the people, 

the very first measure is to satisfy them of his disinter- 
estedness, and that he is directing their affairs with a sin- 
gle eye to their good, and not to build up fortunes for 
himself and family, and especially that the officers ap- 
pointed to transact their business are appointed because 
they are the fittest men, not because they are his rela- 
tions. So prone are they to suspicion, that where a Pres- 
ident appoints a relation of his own, however worthy, 
they will beheve that favor, and not merit, was the mo- 
tive. I therefore laid it down as a law of conduct for 
myself never to give an appointment to a relation." 

\_Lctter to J. Garland Jefferson, Jan. 25, 18 10. 

And John Adams, after having been rebuked by public 
sentiment for appointing only two relatives to office, and 
transferring another, refused to comply with the wishes 
of a fourth, saying : 

" You know it is impossible for me to appoint my own 
relations to anything without drawing forth a torrent of 
obloquy." 

An early letter of John Quincy Adams to his mother, 



ON THE SUBJECT OF NEPOTISM. 45 

of date long prior to his accession to the Presidency, 
gives his views upon this subject in the following words ; 

" I hope, my dear and honored mother, that you are 
fully convinced from my letters, which you have before 
this received, that upon the contingency of my father's 
being placed in the first magistracy, I shall never give 
him any trouble by solicitation for office of any kind. 
Your late letters have repeated so many times that I shall 
in that case have nothing to expect, that I am afraid you 
have imagined it possible that I might form expectations 
from such an event. I had hoped that my mother knew 
me better ; that she did me the justice to believe that I 
have not been so totally regardless or forgetful of the 
principles which my education had instilled, nor so to- 
tally destitute of a personal sense of delicacy as to be 
susceptible of a wish tending in that direction." — John 
Adams s. Works, Vol. VIII. , pp. 529, 530, note. 

We might well have believed that the settled convic- 
tion of such men as these would have precluded for all 
time the return to a practice so obnoxious to the good 
sense of the nation. 

Ignorant of the laws which guarded the Revenue sys- 
tem from abuse, one of the earlier appointments of Gen- 
eral Grant to his cabinet, was a blunder which even Con- 
gress declined to repair.* 

Other laws with which it is presumed he was familiar, 
restricting the detachment of army officers upon civil 
service, were set at naught by attaching to his household, 
and one may almost say, to his person, no less than four 
brigadier-generals, whose names, then as now, with one 
exception, are upon the rolls of the army ; so that his 
occupancy of the Presidential mansion bore more the 
appearance of a mere shifting of the military head-quar- 

* The name of Mr. A. T. Stewart, of New York, the well-known dry 
goods importer of princely fortune, whose palatial edifices are among the 
notabilities of the city, was sent to the Senate for confirmation as Secre- 
tary of the Treasury, but it was discovered by that body that Mr. Stewart 
was ineligible by law, and Congress refused, upon the request of President 
Grant, to remove his disabilities. 



46 grant's military secretaries, 

ters of the general of the armies than the unostentatious 
residence of our Republican chief magistrate.* 

It has been alleged in extenuation of so flagrant a vio- 
lation of law, that we have the example of Mr. Lincoln 
to sustain it ; but everybody feels that it is insulting to 
his reason to claim, as a precedent to be imitated in time 
of profound peace, a state of things which only existed 
by the enforced necessities of war. 

Ordinarily the President of the United States, even in 
his capacity of Commander-in-chief of the army, would 
refrain from making any direct interference with the mil- 
itary status of its subordinate officers. The whole scope 
and tenor of the service in all its branches being strictly 
7nilitary, the authority of every officer of the army, in- 
cluding the Commander-in-chief, is limited and controlled 
by that service, so that without the special authority of 
Congress, not even the President would be authorized 
to withdraw an army officer from his post of duty, and 
assign him to civil service.f Such would not be a detail- 
ing within the technical meaning of the term as applied to 
the military service and confined to its duties ; but a de- 

*■ In a speech recently delivered in the House of Representatives by the 
Hon. Henry W. Slocum, of Brooklyn, the following significant passage oc- 
curs : " If a citizen would pay his respects to the Chief Magistrate, he must 
first pass in review at the White House before three or four brigadier-gen- 
erals. If we desire to negotiate for the purchase of an island in the sea, the 
negotiation must be carried on by a brigadier-general. If the merchants of 
New York wish storage for their goods, they must go to a colonel of the 
staff. We can hardly pass a bill through Congress without the aid at least 
of a field officer." 

f Congress has passed several laws upon this subject during the last 
thirty years, all of which, either expressly or by implication, prohibit offi- 
cers of the army from engaging in civil pursuits, or being detailed out of 
their strict line of duty, except as specially provided for. The latest of 
these laws (act of July, 1870), provides "that it shall not be lawful for any 
officer of the army of the United States on the active list, to hold any civil 
office, whether by election or appointment, and any such officer accepting 
or exercising the functions of a civil office, shall at once cease to be an 
officer of the army, and his commission shall be vacated thereby." 

\See Statutes at Large, Vol. XVI. p. 319. 



THEIR CIVIL OFFICES ILLEGALLY HELD. 47 

tachment from it altogether, which was never contemplated 
by its use. 

How, then, should we receive the withdrawal of Gen- 
erals Dent, Babcock, Porter, and Badeau from their posts 
in the army and their assignment to civil duties with the 
President ? 

Nay, more, what shall we say now that it has been 
officially given out that the three first named of these 
officers have been made secretaries to the President, and 
are actually serving in that capacity at this date ! 

Squared by the law, these two things cannot be at one 
and the same time. If these officers still hold their com- 
missions in the military service, they cannot be secreta- 
ries to the President. If they are secretaries to the Pres- 
ident, they cannot be officers. in the army. The law for- 
bids it. Nothing can be plainer ! And yet, under the 
patronage of the Executive, and whilst actually in his 
service, in a civil capacity, their names are carried upon 
the military rolls and they actually draw their pay from 
the army fund. 

The place of secretary to the President is an office, and 
a civil office at that. 'It makes no difference how the 
incumbent is compensated. He may volunteer his ser- 
vices, having such right, and receive neither pay nor emol- 
uments, nevertheless he is the holder of an office and in 
the discharge of a civil duty. We may, however, be an- 
swered that this office of secretary is one which is re- 
quired to be created by law, and that inasmuch as Con- 
gress has made no provision for the military staff of Gen. 
Grant, their several secretaryships are a mere assump- 
tion, having no legal status, and consequently infringing 
no law. In other words, that neither of the officers in 
question actually holds any civil place. 

This does not dispose of the infraction of those military 
laws which limit and define the employment of army 
officers ; and as to the other branch of the question, we 
reply that the unwarranted exercise of power is no less 
than a usurpation. If, therefore, there be in fact no such 



48 THE president's defiance of the law. 

offices as these military gentlemen are presumed to fill, 
and no legal right for the functions which they assume 
to exercise, the whole thing is a false assumption of 
power on the part of the President, and should be re- 
buked in fitting terms by the people.* 

The law provides for one secretary and one assistant 
secretary to the President, and there stops. Both of 
these places are filled by competent gentlemen, who, so 
far as their private fortunes are concerned, have the mis- 
fortune to be outside of the " military ring." The princi- 
pal of these secretaries was officially notified of his ap- 
pointment by General Porter, who signed himself Brevet- 
Brigadier-General, Secretary, and the blue book, which 
is the national register of officers employed in the public 
service, places at the head of secretaries attached to the 
executive mansion, the names of " General F. T. Dent, 
General Horace Porter," and " General O. E. Babcock." 

The appointment of his former staff officers as secreta- 
ries in the presidential mansion, was the first official act of 
the new President, and the appointments were made on 
the very day of his inauguration, while yet his solemn oath 
to " take care that the laws be faithfully executed" was 
warm upon his lips. If it be pleaded that this forbidding 
mandate was unknown to General Grant at the time of 
making these appointments, how is his retention of these 
officers about his person to be explained ? Will it be 
contended that he was likewise ignorant of the law of 
1870, which made the acceptance of a civil office by an 
officer in the military service of itself work a forfeiture 
of his commission ? 

* See testimony of General Babcock before the San Domingo Committee 
of Investigation : 

" Question by the Chairman — Where do you reside ? A. — I am stationed 
at Washington. 

" Q. — You belong to the army of the United States? A. — Yes, sir ; I am 
in the Corps of Engineers, United States Army. 

" Q. — How long have you been stationed here ? A. — Since the close of 
the war. I came with General Grant when he came here after the close of 
the war in 1865." 



GENERAL BADEAU. 49 

Let it be borne in mind that this latter law was passed 
during the official term of President Grant, and received 
his signature and approval ! It is more than likely that 
the law in question was intended by Congress to put an 
end to the system of military secretaries at the White 
House. The spectacle, too, of military lobbyists and mili- 
tary messengers, between the President and the national 
Legislature, was obnoxious to republican ideas, and con- 
trary to established usage. 

In the meantime General Badeau, who was known to 
have achieved his title and his place by the flatteries 
which he was able, as his biographer, to bestow upon 
the President, was sent abroad as Consul-General to Lon- 
don, and in order that his apocryphal work might still 
progress, he was allowed to ransack diud pillage the sacred 
records of the War Department, under the authority of 
his exalted patron. 

A previous attempt of the Executive to place his biog- 
rapher as Secretary of Legation at the Court of St. 
James had been resisted by Mr. Motley, who thereby 
incurred the ill-will of the President, which finally led to 
his recall. 

By these and similar practices of a selfish and demor- 
alizing nature, it soon became apparent to the most cas- 
ual observer, that the vast patronage of the Executive 
was to be prostrated to the accomplishment of his per- 
sonal aims. 



CHAPTER V. 

Moses H. Grinnell appointed Collector of the Port of New York. — Arrival 
of Leet. — His extravagant demands. — The General Order business, a 
rich plum. — An arrangement finally made. — The Military Mess at the 
White House. — Leet's annual pay. — Babcock's testimony. — Leet's recipe 
to make money. — The dinner at Willard's. — Leet still demands " more." — 
Mr. Grinnell rebels and his head falls into the basket. — New York gets 
a new Collector. 

Among those who, by their activity and zeal greatly 
promoted the success of the Presidential campaign of 
1868, particularly in the way of raising large sums of 
money, was the well-known merchant of New York — 
Moses H. Grinnell. The subscriptions for this object, 
obtained, in a great measure through his personal so- 
licitation, amounted to a very large sum. 

Such a substantial testimonial of his good-will was not 
to be overlooked by General Grant, and, in the course 
of events, Mr. Grinnell was waited upon by a young 
lieutenant of the army, with the brevet rank of colonel 
who presented a letter of introduction from the ChieJ 
Magistrate of this nation, in the following terms : 

" Executive Mansion, 
"Washington, D. Q.^March% 1869. 

" M. H. Grinnell: — Dear Sir, — This wn. introduce 
you to Col. G. K. Leet, who served under me from early 
m the war to the present day, from the fall of Vicksburg 
forward as a staff officer. He is a business man of un- 
questioned integrity. His experience before the war 
fits him for business of ahnost any kind. He now pro- 
poses to resign from the army to engage in private life, 
(so) 



MR. GRINNELL MADE COLLECTOR. 5 1 

and I cheerfully commend him as possessing all the 
qualities necessary to inspire your confidence. 

" Yours truly, 

" U. S. Grant." 



Mark the date of this letter ! Its distinguished author 
had been President just five days ! and up to the mo- 
ment of its delivery, at the hands of the fortunate Leet, 
Mr. Grinnell was not aware that his name had been 
"sent in" as Collector of the Port of New York — the 
most important office, pecuniarily considered, in the gift 
of the Executive. 

Before holding an interview with Mr. Grinnell, Col. 
Leet was so elated with his prospective good fortune, 
that, in exhibiting the President's letter to a personal 
friend (Mr. White), he remarked, with the confidence of 
one who feels himself " master of the situation," that he 
considered it '■''just as good an order as he wanted T' allud- 
ing, of course, to the *' General Order" business which 
was his objective point, and which, it is sufficient to say, 
is by far the most lucrative, as well as unnecessarily bur- 
densome of all the complicated machinery employed in 
the conduct of the Customs Department of New York — 
the income of which has been moderately estimated to 
yield a net profit of ^;z^ hundred thousand dollars per an- 
num !^ 

For the benefit of those who have been so fortunate 

* The following is from the testimony of Mr. John P. Lindsay, the con- 
fidential adviser of Mr. Grinnell in this business, and was taken before the 
last Custom-house Investigating Committee of the Senate: 

"Q. — I understand you to say that Col. Leet informed Mr. Grinnell that 
he (Grinnell) was to be appointed collector of the port of New York be- 
fore the appointment took place ? A. — So he told me. 

"Q. — Was this before Mr. Grinnell knew it himself? A. — So he told 
me. 

" Q.— About how long before ? A.— If I had Willard's Hotel register I 
could tell you exactly about how long. It could not have been more than 
one or two, or perhaps three days in advance, but I cannot now say. The 
register at Willard's Hotel would tell when I was there. 

" Q. — Was it then that Mr. Leet exhibited to you these letters of recom- 



52 THE GENERAL ORDER BUSINESS. 

as to escape the fraternal hug of those " old men of the 
sea," whose telling zeal on the winning side of politics it 
has been customary to reward with the "-pickings ayid steal- 
ings' of this much-coveted and enterprising pursuit, it 
may be well to explain that the " General Order" busi- 
ness is the monopoly of storing dutiable goods delivered 
at the port of New York from foreign countries, which 
are not taken by their owners and consignees in due 
course, within forty-eight hours after their arrival. 

In practice, this is rendered impossible, from the cir- 
cumstance that, comparatively few of our importers are 
able to get their invoices through the Custom-house and 
obtain permits to land their goods within the time speci- 
fied ; and as the vessels, more particularly the steamers, 
are required to effect an early discharge of their cargoes 
in order to complete their preparations for their return 
voyages, the bulk of their freight, and not unfrequently 
the entire cargo is sent to some storehouse authorized 
to receive it, under what is designated a " General 
Order ;" that is to say, an order from the Collector of 
Customs, requiring all imported goods upon which the 

mendation at Willard's Hotel ? A. — Yes, sir; and on one of them the ink 
was hardly dry. 

" Q. — Which one was that ? A. — The one from the President. 

" Q. — Did he apply to Mr. Grinnell at once for the general order busi- 
ness? A. — At once; at the time he came, and with the information he 
gave Mr. Grinnell of his going to be appointed collector. 

" Q. — Had you understood from Mr. Leet before he left Washington that 
he intended to ask for it? A. — I had. He came and talked to me on the 
subject before. 

" Q. — He had conversed with you about that ? A. — Yes, sir ; and told 
me what he thought he could make out of it. 

" Q- — What did he think he could make out of it? A. — Sixty or seventy 
thousand dollars a year ; and from that, together with the labor contract, 
he calculated he could make somewhere not far from $100,000. He ex- 
pected and attempted to get the labor contract in the public stores, and 
this Mr. Haw was to be ostensibly the party to get the contract. So he told 
me last night. I know nothing further than that. 

" O. — The labor contract in the public stores? A. — Yes, sir, 

" Q. — And out of these two businesses Mr. Leet thought he could make 
■$100,000? A. — Yes, sir." 



A "PARTY PLUM." 53 

duties shall not have been paid, and permits for their 
landing and removal obtained within forty-eight hours, 
to be so stored. In consequence of this rule, the importer 
is obliged to pay a full month's storage on his goods, al- 
though they may not be in store twenty -four hours, 
which is quite likely to be the case. 

When the enormous amount of importations at this 
port is taken into account, it is easy to understand how 
it is that a month's storage upon every package amounts, 
in the yearly aggregate, to the princely sum which this 
monopoly has been estimated to annually yield. 

It was this ^^ party plum,'' as it has been aptly termed, 
that Col. Leet was anxious to secure, and so well assured 
was he of ultimately obtaining it, that the natural hesita- 
tion of Mr. Grinnell to comply with the demands of one 
who was altogether unknown in political or commercial 
circles, was quickened by the threat, that, " if he (Leet) 
could not get what he wanted from Mr. Grinnell, we 
should have another collector" of the port of New York 
more ready to comply with his wishes !* 

An arrangement was at length effected by which Leet 
was to receive the amount of five thousand six hundred 

* The following statement of Mr. Lindsay, in reply to a question of Mr. 
Ba)'ard, relieves us of all doubt upon this head : 

"Mr. Bayard — Q. — When did Mr. Leet first threaten Mr. Grinnell with 
removal from the office of collector if his demands were not complied 
with? A. — It was soon after he came here with his letters — some few 
weeks ; he did not succeed ; Mr. Grinnell consulted with myself, and, I 
think, one or two other friends — my impression is, but I am not positive, 
that one gentleman was old Mr. Blatchford — in reference to giving Mr. 
Leet the whole of the general order business ; we advised him as his 
friends, or I did, at any rate (I can speak for myself), that it would be very 
impolitic, because it was a matter that the politicians sought for and looked 
after ; and we told him in substance that if he did give it to him entire it 
would bring great discredit not only on him but on people still higher in posi- 
tion, on account of the close relations Mr. Leet had with them ; Mr. Grin- 
nell decided to give him only that portion of it ; after that Mr. Leet was 
earnest and determined to get the entire general order business, together 
with the public store labor contract ; he told me repeatedly that if he could 
not get what he wanted from Mr. Grinnell, we should have another col- 
lector here, and he could get all he wanted." 



54 THE WHITE-HOUSE MILITARY MESS. 

dollars a year out of the profits of the " General Order 
business," without giving any personal attention to it or 
furnishing any capital.* 

Under ordinary circumstances an arrangement so one- 
sided might be regarded in no other light than that of a 
shrewd business transaction ; but when it is taken into 
consideration that this young prot6g6 of the President, 
armed with his letter of introduction, presented himself 
before the new Collector, and with a " Stand and deliver " 
air, demanded of him the most valuable contract at his 
disposal, not so much as a favor, as a right, which it 
would be well for him to recognize, the case presents 
altogether a different aspect. 

And, when added to all this, it is taken into account, 
that at the period of these disgraceful transactions. Col. 
Leet was still in the military service, under full pay, his 
absence from duty being merely temporary, and that he 
belonged to the " mess,'' with Generals Porter and Bab- 
cock, who, together with General Dent, served as secre- 
taries to the President, and formed what is known as the 
" military ring," it is impossible to escape the conviction 
that the plan and purpose of this whole business were of 
the same piece with other equally indefensible enterprises 
which have had the powerful upholding of the Executive. 

* We quote further from the testimony of Mr. Lindsay : 

" Q. — You speak of Mr. Leet's receiving some $5,600 per annum from 
the general order business ? A. — Yes, sir. 

" Q. — Was that in the way of a salary, or as the result of a business ? 
A. — As the result of a business. 

" Q. — Did he give any personal attention to that business ? A. — Not any 
at all. 

" Q. — If it was done as a business it was done by his agents? A. — Done 
Dy his partners, I should judge, by arrangement ; Mr. Bixby was a partner 
of his, because they divided the overplus. 

" Q. — Did he devote any of the time which he was under obligation as 
an officer of the Government to use in the service of the Government to 
this general order business ? A. — No, sir ; only going often to Washington. 

" Senator Pratt — Q. — Did Col. Leet put any capital in this business ? 
A. — Not a dollar. 

" Q. — Did he render any personal services to the warehouses ? A. — Not 
that I ever knew of, sir." 



leet's income. 55 

The proof is clear that in addition to the $5,600 which 
eet drew from the General Order business, carried on 

by his partner Bixby, his army pay amounted to $4,000, 

making a total of $9,600. 

Mr. Lindsay's testimony upon this point is as follows : 

" Senator Casserly — Q. — What was Mr. Leet's salary 
in the War Department ? A. — I am only able to give the 
impression I had, which I formed from his own conversa- 
tion. I presume the records will show the facts. I 
think about $4,000 a year. 

Q. — " In addition to $5,600 from the general order busi- 
ness? A. — Yes, sir. I think his rank was Lieutenant- 
Colonel, or Major ; I am not positive. That will show for 
itself, of course. 

'' Q. — How long did he remain in the War Depart- 
ment after Mr. Grinnell's appointment as Collector? A. 
— I am not able to tell you. Perhaps from some of Col. 
Leet's letters I may be able to fix when he resigned from 
the army. It was some months after that, I think. I 
have letters that may, perhaps, refresh my recollection on 
that subject. 

" Q. — Are you sure he remained in the War Depart- 
ment" drawing salary as a clerk after he became inter- 
ested in this general order business ? A. — I am sure that 
I sent checks myself to him while he was in the War De- 
partment for the proceeds of the general order business, 
and if it is your wish I can produce the checks with the 
endorsements on the back of them." 

We are of the opinion that some of our mutilated 
volunteers, of good business training and large experi- 
ence, would be quite satisfied with less than one half of 
Col. Leet's income. 

How far Generals Porter and Babcock are implicated 
with Col. Leet, in his raid upon the Custom House, we 
shall not undertake to say, inasmuch as the testimony 
upon this point is, at the best, indecisive and conflicting. 

If, on the one hand, we are to give credit to the state- 
ments of the two secretaries themselves, we must con- 
clude that they not only had no interest with Leet in any 
of his New York transactions, but that they were p 



56 leet's recipe to make money. 

posely kept in ignorance of them until after the report 
of the first, or, as it is commonly called, the Patterson 
Committee of investigation.* 

There are, however, some facts and circumstances of a 
suspicious character, which point to these gentlemen. 

The business qualifications of Col. Leet, of the U. S. A., 
then fresh from the staff of the General of the Armies, 
enabled him to complete his arrangement with Bixby in 
so short a time as to be scarcely missed at the mess-table, 
to which he returned in no very communicative mood. 

At any rate, we have the evidence of his messmates 
to the fact that he never alluded to his New York affairs 
in their hearing. Nor is it to be wondered at, that one 
possessed of a valuable recipe, '' hozv to make $5,600 /^r 
annum by doing nothing,'' should be a little slow about 
imparting it to others, and especially to those who, with 
some reason, might insist upon sharing in its avails. 

But Leet too well understood the value of his ''Letters 
Patent " to allow himself to be put off with one-fourth 
of the "general order" business, nothwithstanding Mr. 

*The following is an extract from General Babcock's testimony, as given 
before the second committee of investigation ; 

" Question by the Chairman — Please state your present position ? A. — 
[ am a major in the Engineer Corps, U. S. A. Am on dut}' as Secretary of 
the President since his inauguration, and since June last on duty as engi- 
neer in charge of public buildings and grounds, to which has been added 
the Washington aqueduct. I have no interest whatever in general order 
business in New York with Col. Leet or with Mr. Stocking, or with any in- 
dividual, nor have I ever received a cent in any way, shape or manner, from 
the Custom House office. 

" Q. — Were you one of the mess connected with Gen. Porter and Col. 
Leet ? Did you mess together ? A. — Yes, sir ; that is, Gen. Porter and I 
were living together, and we invited Col. Leet to come and live with us in 
the spring of 1869, after his family left Washington. 

" Q. — Did }^ou then have any knowledge that Col. Leet had an}' interest 
in the general order business? A. — I had not. 

" Q. — When did you first have that knowledge? A. — I did not know it 
until the publication of Patterson's report. 

' Q. — Was Leet, at the time he messed with you and Porter, engaged in 
the War Department ? A. — He was. He remained on duty in the War 
Department until February or March, 1870, when he resigned, to take eifect 
the lollowing September. 



HE DEMANDS MORE AND GETS IT. 57 

(jrinnell had so far obliged him as to change the place 
of storage from Hoboken to New York, so that the Bixby 
warehouses might be brought into immediate requisi- 
tion. Leet had started out to get the whole of this 
business, and nothing less would satisfy his demands. 

Mr. Lindsay, the medium through whom his negotia- 
tions were conducted, was continually besieged with 
letters dated at the White House, and otherwise, some- 
times coaxingly, and at others with threats of Executive 
displeasure and interference. 

The following note was preliminary to a dinner-party 
conference at " Willard's," at which, according to Leet's 
testimony, Grinnell, Porter, Babcock, and Leet himself 
were present: 

" Executive Mansion, 
"Washington, D. C, Sept. 6, 1869. 

" My Dear Mr. Lindsay : Porter will be glad to see 
you, and as he is going out to dinner at 2 o'clock, it 
would be well to come over. I will speak to Dent and 
ask him to admit you immediately to Porter's room. 

" Yours, Leet," 

At this little entertainment the whole matter of the 
" general order " business was talked over, and resulted 
in further concessions to Leet, who was apparently satis- 
fied. But in a little while he lit upon the old sore 
hungrier than ever. Indeed, he would never allow it 
fairly to scab over. The burden of his war-cry was still 
" The whole of the business or a new collector T 

He did not get the whole, but in course of time New 
York did get a new collector in the person of Thomas 
Murphy ! 

There is but one power in the land that can make these 
changes, and the belUcose colonel had not " reckoned with- 
out his host." 

If there is any blemish upon the official record of Moses 
H. Grinnell, it is that he yielded too much to the impu- 
dent demands of Leet, whose claim upon any share of the 



58 MR. grinnell's head in the basket. 

patronage at the bestowal of the Collector, was a barren 
pretense. But that Leet came directly from the Presi- 
dent to Mr. Grinnell, to impart to him authoritatively the 
knowledge of his appointment, and to set up his claim to 
the most lucrative place 7iominally at his disposal, as if its 
concession were a part of a compact between the Execu- 
tive and his appointee, has been made as clear as noonday. 
That Mr. Grinnell foresaw the difficulties in his way and 
sndeavored to escape them, even going so far as to offer 
Leet $5,000 a year during his Collectorship, if he (Leet) 
would quietly return to Washington, and receive his 
money by regular installments, we have the authority of 
Leet himself for saying. But no, every offer of compro- 
mise and all remonstrances upon the part of Mr. Grinnell, 
were answered by Leet with a flourish of his credentials and 
a demand for his " pound of flesh !" Denial of his claims 
was pointed out to Mr. Grinnell to be official suicide, 
and over and over again the warning was rung in his ears, 
" All to me or nothing to you." Step by step the ram- 
pant colonel advanced, more and more he gained, until 
his share of the spoils amounted to Tzventy-five thousand 
dollars a year ! Still he was dissatisfied, and demanded 
more, more. Like the famous student of Sangrado he had 
profited by his great master and believed in bleeding every 
time ! But if Mr. Grinnell had been bullied into turning 
over to Leet and his business associates, the lion's share 
of the cartage and storage business, he was still able to 
prevent in great measure, the extortions afterwards prac- 
ticed upon importers, by fixing comparatively reason- 
able rates for the cartage to, and storage of merchandise 
in the public warehouses ; and firm in the belief that the 
President of the United States could not be induced, even 
at the solicitation of one of his military favorites to inter- 
fere in a matter of this sort, he placed his back to the wall 
and manfully refused to be driven from his position ; but 
whilst he was yet contending with his insatiable persecu- 
tor, the arm of the Executive was put forth and he was 
hfted quite over to the other side. 



CHAPTER VI. 

Mr. Grinnell's successor. — Honest Tom Murphy. — Leet prepares to swal- 
low him whole. — Leet's influence with the President. — His extortions 
complained of by the merchants directly to the President, to no pur- 
pose. — His enormous profits under Murphy. — The voters called upon to 
abate the evil. 

Of the successor of Mr. Grinnell, so much has already 
been given to the public through the medium of the press, 
that little is here required to be said. If his early advan- 
tages were few, the opportunities which the rebellion offer- 
ed for speculation in army supplies had not been neglect- 
ed by him, and very many of our war-worn veterans in 
the field who were compelled to draw upon the commis- 
sary stores for their uniform caps, will call to mind the 
rapidity with which the army-blue faded in the sun to a 
dingy red, as well as other good-for-nothing features of 
that warlike head-gear, only comparable to the paper shoes 
which sympathized with them so extravagantly. There 
was a soldier's heartiness in the imprecations which the 
men at the front showered upon the heads of the unknown 
contractors, who contriving to retain their monopolies by 
concealing their names, grew rich and infamous at the 
same time ! 

It was not thought possible then, that when the whole 
country should be redeemed from a state of war, the 
superior business qualifications of this class of men would 
be called into requisition to fill the high offices of honor and 
trust at the bestowal of the Executive ; but such at least 
has been the good fortune of Mr. Thomas Murphy ! It 
has been cruelly hinted that the little matter of thirty 
thousand dollars invested by Mr. Murphy and a couple 

(59) 



6o LEET REMOVES TO NEW YORK CITY. 

of his friends, in a cottage for the President at Long 
Branch, first drew the attention of General Grant to the 
unquestioned abihties of Mr. Grinnell's successor ; but 
surely those who have given credence to this report, could 
not have known of Mr. Murphy's valuable public services 
in defence of his maimed and bleeding country, in the 
capacity of an army contractor. 

There was a magnanimity too, in making this selection 
which rose quite above any considerations of party, for 
Mr. Murphy, up to the date of his appointment, was alto- 
gether unknown as a repubhcan, so that General Grant, 
in his efforts to induce him to accept the acknowledg- 
ments of a grateful people for his distinguished services in 
the past, was not compelled to use many far-reaching argu- 
ments, being confined to one of the two things which had 
brought Mr. Murphy quite recently into notice, and allow- 
ed to make free choice between his shoddy soldier-caps 
and a private gift of ten thousand dollars to himself 
General Grant has never seen fit to remove the uncer- 
tainty which is still felt regarding his motive in making 
this appointment. 

Before the accession of Murphy to the Collectorship 
Leet resigned his military office and removed his base 
of operations from the Executive Mansion,* to the City 
of New York, where his business had grown to such an 
extent as to require his undivided attention. 

There, too, he formed a partnership with a Mr. Stock- 
ing, whose name appears in most of his subsequent oper- 
ations. 

But Colonel Leet does not appear to have lost his hold 

* See testimony of Mr. Lindsay : 

" Q.— You state that while Mr. Leet was writing you from Washington 
his letters were most frequently from the White House ? A. — Yes sir. 

" Q.— Down to what period did that continue ? A.— So long as he cor 
responded with me." 

And again : 

" Senator Bayard.— Did Mr. Leet at any time make any statement to you 
of the insufficiency of this $5,600 for expenses in Washington? He oftec 
iomplained that he did not get enough." 



\ 



LEET MAKES A TEN-STRIKE. 6l 

Upon the Executive, nor to have been kept in ignorance 
of his intentions regarding the collectorship. 

In the course of some negotiations between Leet and 
Stocking and Mr. Luther Horton, looking to a partner- 
ship with the latter gentleman, Leet boasted of his influ- 
ence with the President ; and Horton was assured that 
should Mr. Murphy (whose name had been mentioned by 
the administration organs in connection with the Custom- 
House as if to break the shock which his sudden precipi- 
tation into office might occasion), or any other man re- 
ceive the appointment of collector in place of Mr. Grin- 
nell, he (Leet) would be able, with the assistance of Gen- 
eral Porter, to procure a letter from the President which 
would insure him the continued monopoly of the " gen- 
eral order and cartage business."* 

And so it was ; for on the coming in of Mr. Murphy, 
everything was conceded to Leet and his business associ- 
ates, whose abuses and abominations were suffered to run 
riot without let or hinderance. It was in vain that the 
importers complained, and protested against their uncon- 
scionable extortions ! More than once the attention of 
the Executive was specially drawn to it by prominent 
merchants, in the hope that an abuse so injurious to com- 
merce might receive some check from that high quarter.f 

* They told me," said Mr. Horton, in his testimony before the committee, 
" that if Mr. Murphy or any other man got appointed to the Custom House, 
Leet could go right to Washington and through Porter get a letter from 
General Grant to set him straight in five minutes." 

f Mr. A. T. Stewart testifies that he complained twice to the President of 
the extortions practised for the benefit of Leet : 

"Q._Have you ever stated your views to the Secretary of the Treasury 
or the President? A.— Well, I prefer that you should not ask me that 
question. I never did to the Secretary of the Treasury. 

"• Q —Will you mention whether you called the attention of the President 
to it. A. — I have. 

" Q._When first ? A.— October, a year ago. 

"Q.— October, 1870? A.— Yes, sir. 

" Q.—More than once ? A.— Yes, sir. 

" Q.— How often, if you please ? A.— At another time. 

" Q.— When was that ? A. — Last summer. 



62 LEET TRIES TO ACCOUNT FOR HIS PROFITS. 

No notice whatever was ever taken of these repeatec 
complaints and remonstrances. 

The outrages upon our commerce in the harbor of 
New York, under the systematic and shameless plunder- 
ing of Leet and company were winked at if not encour- 
aged and protected by the government, and allowed to 
go on without interruption or abatement. 

In many instances the cartage and storage tariff estzb- 
lished by them exceeded the whole cost of freightage 
from foreign ports, and even then they seemed to be ap- 
peased, rather than satisfied with their gains. Their in- 
come was something enormous ! In his statement before 
the last committee, Leet undertook to account for his 
profits. It is remarkable (?) at least, that in this exhibit, 
the snug little sum of $30,000 was entirely lost sight of! 
Shall we look for it where Mr. Bowen looked for the 
$25,000 profit made at a single deal upon the President's 
Sherman house ? Has it been invested in blooded stock 
or a perpetual loan without interest ? 

Time and time again the robberies of Leet & Co. were 

" Q. — Did you express your views to him at any other time ? A. — I did ; 
only twice. 

" Q. — Did you succeed in obtaining any reformation or improvement in 
the system ? A. — No, sir. 

" Q. — In any particular? A. — No, sir. 

" Q. — Does it remain precisely as it was before you made those repre- 
sentations to that high quarter ? A. — Yes, sir. 

" Q. — About this order of the Secretary of the Treasury, or letter, tending 
to rectify this general prder abuse, did you ever see such a letter from the 
Secretary? A.— I think I did ; I think it must have been addressed to the 
Collector. The Collector declined on the ground that he had nothing to 
do with the general order stores. 

" Q. — Is that the request (showing the paper to witness) ? A. — Yes ; it i' 
the second letter; I think letter of the 9th of June, 1870. Mr. Murphy 
took the position that the Secretary had no right to order him where he 
should store the goods. 

" Q. — You did not appeal to the Custom House or Secretary, but you did 
to the President ; what was that complaint ? A. — I stated to him the facts ; 
that there was great inconvenience in having the general order business 
taken from the stores, and it ought to be returned to them. 

"Q. — He did not issue such an order? A. — Not that I am aware of." 



HIS ENORMOUS PROFITS. 6^ 

forced upon the attention of the President, from whom a 
single word or gesture of disapproval would have suf. 
ficed to put an end to them. He had but to cry '' halt T 
and the reform so earnestly implored would have been 
an accomplished fact. Where, then, rests the responsi- 
bility ?* 

We shall pursue this putrid excrescence of the Custom 
House no further, but in taking leave of Leet & Co. we 
would appeal to the young men of this country, espe- 
cially to those who, having given some of their best years 
to its service, now find themselves engaged in various 
industrial pursuits, and in the receipt of average incomes, 
for ///rzV judgment upon a monopoly established and sus- 
tained by that government, whereby a favorite of the Ex- 
ecutive, of no higher capacity and no more deserving 
than any one of their number, is fastened like a leech 
upon the commerce of the port of New York, and allow- 
ed to indulge in a course of systematic robbery year after 
year for his private advantage, exceeding in amount the 
annual rate of one hundred thousand dollars ! 

To the sun-browned farmer at his plow — the mechanic 
in his workshop, the day-laborer at his honest toil, we 
make our appeal. Let him calculate the earnings of men 
in all stations of life, and average them/^r capita. Do 
they reach the moderate sum of one thousand dollars 
per annum ? Assuredly not ! 

Why, then, should this enormous income of Leet & 

* The following testimony was elicited from a credible witness by the 
late committee, the majority of whom have smuggled through a report 
holding up the parties implicated in these petty robberies as pattern saints • 

" Q. — Then you think the general order charges are perfectly superflu- 
ous ? A. — There is no question about it. 

Q. — On an average of $1.75 per package, what would the profit be? A.— 
Fifty cents would cover all the expense. 

Q. — Suppose the goods go to the general order stores for only an hour, 
are the charges the same ? A. — Yes, sir. 

Q.— Ten cents per package for the cartage would pay the expense ? A. — 
Yes, sir; and leave a profit. 

Q.— At what would you estimate the net profit from the general order 
business ? A. — $150,000 or $200,000 a year." 



64 IT IS THE VOTERS WHO PAY THE PIPER. 

Co. be secured to them by the government? They pro- 
duce nothing ! They do not add a fraction of a penny 
to the solid wealth of the nation. Who, then, we de- 
mand, pays the tax finally ? The conclusion is inevitable ; 
it must come from the earnings of the laboring classes. 

And so if we will but have the patience to follow out 
the extortionate charges which this disreputable firm 
were authorized to levy as a kind of irregular tax upon 
merchandize, we shall be led directly into the workshop, 
the farm-house, and the humble habitations of working- 
men, who at the best are able to earn only a few hun- 
dred dollars a year. It is indeed these very classes who 
are taxed, indirectly, to fill the coffers of one of the 
President's military ring, whose receipts are equal to four 
hundred dollars for every working day; and this is Re- 
publicanism under Grant ! 



\ 



CHAPTER VII. 

Custom House briber}' and corruption. — The District Attorney ordered to 
prosecute the merchants; the officials to go scot free. — Col. Frank E. 
Howe, Administration Factotum. — Inquisitor Jayne. — He exhibits his 
handcuffs. — The saintly Carr. — Detective Whitley.— His subordinates 
and the extent of their operations. — The headcentre of the Custom 
House Ring. — The area of his operations. — The levy on the salaries of 
the employees. — Three hundred discharged for no apparent reason. — 
How he overslaughed the N. Y. State Convention. — He resigns his 
office and the President glorifies him. 

It must be evident to such as have the slightest ac- 
quaintance with the mass of testimony taken by the two 
Senate Committees, exposing the frauds and corruptions 
of the New York Custom House, that the most cursory 
review of the subject in all its bearings would cause us to 
wander continually to the one side or the other of the in- 
quiry with which we set out, and to which the investiga- 
tions we have been able to make have been and will con- 
tinue to be strictly directed ; our purpose being merely 
to show how far the President is answerable for, or im- 
plicated in the infamous schemes and practices of his ap- 
pointees, and their subordinates in office. The system in 
many respects, as well as the operation of the revenue 
service connected with the Port of New York was, 
and is, offensively rotten from its innermost core to 
its outer rim. Of this there can be no lingering doubt 
in the mind of the most oblivious partisan of the adminis- 
tration who has taken the pains to examine into it ; but it 
is absurd to say that the administration is wholly respon- 
sible for a state of things which has been known to exist 
in some measure for years, and which has been tolerated 
from year to year by our mercantile classes by whom their 

c (6c^ 



66 ORDER TO PROSECUTE THE MERCHANTS. 

ruinous and demoralizing influences were more imme- 
diately felt. 

Under-weights and appraisements, false estimates and 
other official favors could at any time be had for the 
money, and the money was not wanting. 

The merchant who doled bribes claimed to be honest, 
and compromised with his conscience upon the ground 
of usage and compulsion, and the creatures who received 
them came to look upon their gains as the perquisites of 
office ! These innocent (?) practices are of long stand- 
ing, as the evidence taken by the last Committee shows, 
nor are we aware that any serious attempt has been made 
to do away with them.* 

There was indeed a little outward show of indignation 
for stage effect, and the U. S. District Attorney at New 
York, was instructed to prosecute such as were know7i to 
have corrupted the government officials ^vith bribes, but 
although the evidence before the committee made it clear 
that the petty placemen demanded largesses as an induce- 
ment to their expeditions attention to duty, no notice what- 
ever was taken of it. Upon that side the evil could have 
been easily reached and overcome by a dismissal from 
office ; but instead of reaching in that direction, the effort 
was made to bring to trial the men who had had the te- 
merity to expose a system of fraud on account of which 
they were the chief sufferers, by being forced either to 
pay or sustain a considerable loss arising from the needless 
delays in the handling of goods ; so that the payment of 
" bribes "was in one sense compulsory ! 

A special agent of the Treasury for New York, whose 

* In the course of his remarks in the Senate Chamber, upon this subject, 
Carl Schurz is reported as having said, * * * " the fact remains that this 
scandalous system of robbery is sustained — is sustained against the voice 
of the merchants of New York — is sustained against the judgment and th« 
voice of the Secretary of the Treasury himself, I ask you, how is it sus^ 
tained? Where and what is the mysterious power that sustains it? The 
conclusion is inevitable that it is a power stronger than decent respect for 
public opinion — nay, a power stronger than the Secretary of the Treasury 
himself." 



FACTOTUM HOWE — INQUISITOR JAYNE. 6^ 

duties were of the inquisitorial order, had been provided 
for in the person of Col. Frank E. Howe, who became a 
kind of Administration Factotum or Busybody among 
the merchants. It was his custom after the ground had 
been laid to his satisfaction, to seize all the books, papers 
and correspondence of the suspected firm, aiidYioSA them 
the matter of a fezv months for examination ! If nothing 
was found of an irregular or suspicious character, they 
were magnanimously returned to the injured owner, un- 
less indeed some new accusation was made against him 
in the meantime. In some cases compromises were effect- 
ed before the business of the importer was wholly ruined ! 
when further scrutiny was given over, and the spoils were 
divided between the government and its hirelings.* 

Up to the middle of March, every instance of seizure, 
under Col. Howe, with one exception, which was an 
afterthought, and about which no particulars could be 
given, had resulted in a compromise.^ But all the evils of 
Col. Howe's Bureau, as it is termed, were intensified and 
outdone by Mr. B. G. Jayne, a brother Treasury Agent, 
whose operations were also conducted principally in New 
York. 

This ingenious gentleman had provided himself with a 
pair of handcuffs, which it was his custom to dangle in a 
playful sort of way, before the victims of his Inquisition. 

Let us observe the practice of his office, as he has 
pictured it to us. 

Inquisitor Jayne is seated in his private room. He is 
thinking of Inspector Case, who, having been detected 
and denounced by him for both bribery and theft, in his 
out-of-door service, was charitably removed from tempta- 
tion and promoted to a clerkship under the notorious 
Terwilliger.:}: 

There is a knock at his door, and Mr. Carr, his confi- 

* See cases of Henry B. Cooper, E. Packard & Co., Naylor & Co., and 
others reported in the proceedings of the Senate Committee of 1872. 
f See testimony of Col. Howe, before same committee. 
X See Jayne's Testimony before Senate Committee as to this case. 



68 THE SAINTLY CARR, AND THE HANDCUFFS. 

dential deputy, who had once been a Government 
weigher, but more recently of Canada, whither he had 
flo'W7i on account of some irregularities in his conduct and 
accounts, enters with all the books of account, papers, 
and correspondence of one of our leading importers. 

Presently the culprit is brought in. He is a man in 
middle life, mild mannered, and of great apparent re- 
spectability ; but Mr. Carr has lodged an information 
against him of defrauding the Government by false in- 
voices ; and Mr. Carr is an expert on the subject of 
fraud! Mr. Jayne knows Mr. Carr and takes his word 
for it! 

It is in vain that the accused makes his appeal with 
protestations of innocence. 

Public justice is everything ! the damage to private busi- 
ness nothing ; and Jayne, who has had a smattering of 
law, looks his victim in the face and gravely repeats his 
favorite maxim, as he remembers it from the books, " It 
is better that ninety-nine guilty persons should suffer, 
than that one innocent man should escape punishment." 

The leaves of the books are turned over, the entries 
examined, the column footings proved — and no irregulari- 
ties found ! 

A compromise is suggested by the saintly Carr ! which 
is met by a re-affirmance of innocence. 

At this juncture there is a slight, almost impercept- 
ible, agitation of a pair of handcuffs in an adjoining room, 
and a hint of imprisonment. 

With the merchant, imprisonment is disgrace ; and in- 
nocence counts for nothing. 

He is told that the outraged law will be satisfied with 
a fine ! Even this he hesitates to concede lest it be con- 
strued into a confession of guilt ! There is a palpable 
jingling of the handcuffs! Still he hesitates ! The hand- 
cuffs are seized with a spasmodic shake ! The amount 
demanded is deemed to be excessive. 

An informer, whose appearance would become the 
uniform of Sing Sing, brings forward the handcuffs and 



WHITLEY AND HIS DEPUTIES. 69 

lays them menacingly upon the table ! and the compro- 
mise is effected. 

If our readers believe this picture of the operations 
of the spies and informers set over the merchants of New 
York, to be overdrawn, let them read the testimony taken 
by the last Senate Committee. 

Notwithstanding their repeated outrages, the antics 
of Howe, Jayne & Co. are mild and compassionate in 
comparison with those of the Secret Service Bureau, 
under Colonel H. C. Whitley, whose operations were 
under the immediate direction of the President, and ex- 
tended over the whole country. 

Like Howe and Jayne, Colonel Whitley established 
his head-quarters in the City of New York, His ante- 
cedents were not of a kind to be particularly admired. 
He had been a saloon-keeper and pawnbroker in Mas- 
sachusetts ; a grocer and fugitive slave-catcher in Kan- 
sas ; a trader on the Red River ; a spy under Butler, 
and a liquor-seller in Mobile. 

In person or by deputy he spread abroad his nets, and 
swept down upon the unwary like an avenging angel as 
he was. " Set a thief to catch a thief," was the maxim 
which ruled his department. One of his deputies at 
head-quarters had been accused of murder, another was 
a professional thief!*' 

His subordinates were rated in different ways, so as to 
gather in and rake after the whole field. 

Those who were not deputies were informers, and they 
could be either by turns. 

The law having made no provision for his office, Col. 
Whitley was restrained in the exercise of his will by no 
embarrassing prohibitions. ■ Everything was discretion- 
ary with the chief, within the limits of his instructions, 
and they were broad enough. 

He took cognizance of every species of crime, and was 
permitted to make personal arrests without warrant, and 

* See testimony as to Abram C. Beatty and Andrew C. Wightman, be- 
fore Committee. 



70 TOM MURPHY. 

seizures of goods under an appointment as an inspector 
of customs. 

His underlings, in the exercise of almost equal powers, 
were scattered over every State and Territory. 

By the authority, and in the actual employment of 
the President, the Colonel had operated largely in the 
Southern States.* His special duty there was to ferret 
out the Ku-Klux and bring them to punishment. 
Through his instrumentality, i,ioo indictments were 
found against this class of offenders. There was no end 
to his usefulness ! In New York his quarters consisted 
of three rooms, and a store-room for the retention of 
goods under seizure. But, the goods seized are neither 
returned to their owners, nor accounted for to the Go- 
vernment. They have h^^n facetiously denominated the 
evidence of the case — dumb witnesses which, as a rule, 
never survive to answer a second subpoena ! 

Five hundred thousand cigars were " expended in the 
service." Many of them went to Washington ! Some 
to the Treasury Department ! Some elseivhere ! 

In cases where an offence punishable with great 
severity was charged, and a fine was agreed upon by 
way of compromise, it was customary to withdraw the 
graver charge and substitute another much less severe, 
upon which the mock formality of an examination before 
the United States Commissioner would be proceeded 
with, and the pre-arranged settlement colored with the 
formalities of law ! 

Thus, even the Courts of Justice were made the instru- 
ments of these inquisitorial proceedings, wherein the 
innocent and the guilty were alike victimized by the cun- 
ning of Government spies and the rapacity of informers. 

But, the man who was foremost of all others in the 
State of New York, in his subserviency to the will of the 
Executive, was Tiiomas MiirpJiy, the head and centre of 
the corrupt Custom House Ring, who evidently regarded 

*This is testified to by Colonel Whitley himself, before the Senate Cus- 
tom House Committee. 



HIS POLICY. 71 

office in the light of a great political machine, to be 
run in the interest of the Administration. 

Scarcely had he taken upon himself the responsibilities 
of office, before he began to assume a dictatorial attitude 
in political affairs, which not only included the City of 
New York, but extended over the entire State. In his 
endeavors to carry into effect a line of policy which had 
been marked out for him, Mr. Murphy was free to admit 
that he was governed solely by the personal preferences 
of General Grant, whom he recognized as the head of the 
National Republican party, and consequently as entitled 
to the support of all who claimed to be of the same politic 
cal faith. 

Very soon after his appointment, Murphy sent for 
General George W. Palmer, who was then at the head 
of the Appraiser's Department, in order to talk over the 
political status of his subordinates, and suggest plans to 
secure the right sort of a representation in the approach- 
ing Syracuse Convention. 

It is needless to say that the two names which had 
been prominently mentioned as likely to be presented at 
that Convention in connection with the office of Gover- 
nor, were Horace Greeley, loved and honored of the 
people, and Ex-Lieut. Governor Stewart L. Woodford, 
who showed considerable strength among the office- 
holders and their followers. 

We have the evidence of General Palmer (and we can 
have no better) as to what took place at that interview. 
Among other things : 

" Mr. Murphy said to the General, that it was the President's desire that 
the different heads of the Federal departments should work in unity in 
reference to that convention, and that these heads of departments should get 
together and exercise an influence in the selection of delegates to the con- 
vention ; Mr. Murphy was favorable, if possible, to the selecting of rich men 
who would be willing to pay something for the honor of going to the con- 
vention ; the general was considerably excited by it ; he was chafing at the 
idea of being dictated to, or being required to dictate to his men, in refer- 
ence to that. * * * There was something said in reference to a candidate 
for Governor of the State of New York, to be ballotted for at that conven- 



72 MURPHY AND DESPOTISM. 

tion. * * * It was something in reference to Governor Woodford. * * * 
Mr. Murphy said that Governor Woodford was the President's candidA».e 
and Mr. Terwilliger said that Horace Greeley would be a good candidate 
Mr. Terwilliger having come in during the interview." 

It is notorious that men holding positions in the various 
government offices in the City of New York, against whose 
fidelity and efficiency nothing could be said, lost their 
positions for the sole reason of their refusal to act and vote 
according to the direction of the Collector ivho took his 
cue from the President ! 

In the course of his examination Mr. Murphy confessed 
to having caused the discharge of //zr^^ ///^;z(^r^^ employees 
of the Custom House, but when pressed for the particu- 
lars, he professed to be unable to state the grounds of his 
action in a single instance. 

Men in other departments of the public service were 
sent adrift, against the remonstrances of their chiefs. Many 
of these men had attained great usefulness in their respec- 
tive duties, for which only long experience could fit them. 
This was especially the case in the Appraiser's Depart- 
ment, where it was with difficulty that their lost efficiency 
could be restored by new appointments. 

Will our free President-makers pause upon the ruinous 
way in which thoughtlessly enough, they have suffered 
themselves to be led by unprincipled demagogues who 
would enslave the very souls of their followers? 

Is there any species of servitude more degrading than 
that which holds in subjection the reason and consciences 
of men ? When the private judgment of men and citizens 
is held in contempt, and the free expression of their will 
at the ballot-box hampered and controlled by those in 
authority, is it a state of Liberty, which we profess to 
revere, or a Despotism, which we abhor ! 

Previous to the reign of Ulysses the First, we had con- 
fidently believed that in this country at least, there was 
an end of persecution for opinion s sake ! but he has con- 
vinced us to the contrary. 

It is indeed notorious that the New York State Repub' 



HE RECOGNIZES HIS CHIEF. 73 

lican (?) Convention of 1870 was swarmed upon and fairly 
smothered by the rimners and whippers-in of General 
Grant under the leadership of Collector Murphy, from 
which cause two results followed, the first and immediate 
one being the nomination of the Administration candidate, 
and the last and final one, the overwhelming defeat of the 
bog2is Republican party at the State election. 

There is another interesting feature connected with the 
management of the New York Custom House, which if 
not limited to that establishment was certainly reduced to 
a system of greater uniformity there than elsewhere. We 
have reference to the levying of political assessments upon 
the deputies, clerks and employees, to make up a fund to 
be used in carrying out the wishes of the Executive at 
popular elections. The rate of assessment was over two 
per cent, upon incomes, so that a salaried place of $2,000 
per an. yielded from $50 to $100, to the corruption fund ! 

This patriotic supervision of elections, which was in- 
tended to assist the opinions of men upon political topics, 
and insure the choice of the Administration candidate, 
was extended over Connecticut at the fall election. 

It has been said that the contribution to this fund was 
voluntary on the part of the subordinates of Mr. Murphy ! 
It was voluntary just so far as this, — a notice that an 
assessment was called for was placed before each one of 
them. Those who paid took very good care that the fact 
of payment should be made known to the Collector; 
those who did not pay, were sure to be apprised that the 
government could dispense with their services ! 

In answer to those who were bold enough to suggest a 
different course to Collector Murphy, that functionary 
was wont to declare that he recognized General Grant as 
the head of the Repubhcan party, and as such, his wishes 
should be observed as law ! That his administration of 
the Custom House was most acceptable to His Majesty we 
have every reason to believe. If there is any one thing 
more striking than another in the evidence of Mr. Murphy 
as given to the committee, — even rivaling his deficiency 



74 HE RESIGNS IN A BLAZE OF GLORY. 

of memory — it is his profound ignorance of the laws, cus- 
toms and duties, one and all, of the office which for a sea- 
son was made to honor him. 

In his letter tendering his resignation as Collector of 
Customs, Mr. Murphy says, " When appointed I believed 
I could render a service by accepting the place. Now I 
believe I can render a service by resigning it." To this 
sentiment we respond Amen ! Our allotted space admits 
not of our pressing the subject further. That Thomas 
Murphy's administration of the Custom House was most 
acceptable to Gen. Grant we have been assured over his 
own signature, for if Leet came into office with a letter of 
extravagant praise from the President, Collector Murphy 
went out with one. 

" Executive Mansion, ) 
" Washington, D. C., November 28, 1871. J 
"Hon. Thomas Murphy, Collector of the Port of New York. 

" Dear Sir: Your letter of the 18th inst., tendering your resignation of 
the office of Collector of the Port of New York, with reasons therefor, is 
received. It gives me great pleasure to bear testimony to the efficiency, 
honesty, and zeal with which you have administered the office so long as it 
has been intrusted to )'our keeping. Your own peace of mind, no doubt, 
will be enhanced by leaving the office of Collector, but I doubt, whether 
such a course will in any sense be a benefit to the public service. Under your 
administration the revenues from the New York Custom-House have been 
largely increased, and the cost of collection in proportion to the 
amount collected has been greatly diminished. This is shown by the re 
cords of the Treasury Department. You have had my unqualified con 
fidence ever since you entered the office of Collector. You had that confi- 
dence before or the appointment would not have been tendered you. That 
confidence is still unshaken, and in accepting your resignation I desire to 
give you the fullest assurance of this fact. Whether you remain in or out 
of office time will convince a just public of your entire innocence of the 
charges brought against you. With great respect, your obedient servant, 

" U. S. Grant." 
NOTE. 

We had prepared copious notes in explanation and proof of the text of 
the foregoing chapter, but they have been crowded out by matter which is 
deemed of greater importance. If, however, our readers should entertain 
any doubt that we are sustained and more than sustained in what has been 
said by a host of credible witnesses, let them refer to the testimony taken 
by the later of the two Senate Committees whose investigations were di- 
rected to the corruption of the Custom House Ring in New York. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

PRESIDENTIAL NEPOTISM.— Jesse R. Grant, the President's father- 
Frederick Dent Grant, the President's son.— His career at West Point. 
—His difference with Cadet Smith.— He is sent abroad.— The Rev. M. 
J. Cramer, the President's brother-in-law.— He is made Consul to Leip- 
sic, where he is publicly cowhided in the street and is subsequently 
promoted to be Minister of the U. S. to Denmark ! What the Danes 
think of him. — James F. Casey, another brother-in-law. — He is made 
Collector at New Orleans, in which position he is guilty of the grossest 
outrages and is sustained by the President.— Letter of Senator Butler to 
the President.— George W. Carter.— The price of his virtue.— His his- 
tory.— How he obtained office.— Gov. Warmoth to the President.— The 
Louisiana Legislature marched off to prison.— Rampant Carter sets up 
a new Legislature, and as Speaker of the House issues inflammatory 
proclamations.— The Revenue Cutter used for base purposes.— General 
Emory refuses to prostitute the military arm of the service. — Carter's in- 
genuity in this strait.— Prior to the Philadelphia Convention, rumors of 
Casey's removal ; after the Convention the rumor is hushed up.— Dr. F. 
M. Lamper, second cousin, and the whisky trade at Chicago.— He is de- 
tected in frauds and promoted to a better office.— His brilliant financial 
transactions in Washington Territory.— Orvil L. Grant, a brother. — His 
interest in the public offices at Chicago.— He is an office broker. 

The nepotism of General Grant has been a subject of 
much comment, and we are glad to be able to say, that 
his appointment to office of so many of his near relations 
has met with severe censure, not only in the pubHc press, 
but from all classes of the people and all parts of the 
country. We have had occasion to allude to this subject 
in a preceding chapter. 

Jesse R. Grant, the President's father is the Postmas- 
ter at Covington, in the State of Kentucky. He was ap- 
pointed by President Johnson, and although he has been 
permitted to hold over, contrary to the general rule, it 

(75) 



'J^ JESSE'S BUSINESS OPERATIONS. 

has been claimed by a species of technical reasoning, that 
the President is not to be held responsible for it. 

It was Jesse who carried on the tanning business in the 
interior of Ohio, at the period when the Honorable 
Thomas Hamer was so obliging as to open the doors of 
West Point to young Hiram, and although quite uninten- 
tionally, to stand god-father at his second christening! 
The father informs us that his sole object in procuring 
these advantages for his son, was to avoid the expense of 
a private education. 

At some period of the war, Jesse formed a co-partner- 
ship for the purpose of buying cotton in the rebel States, 
and sending it North for sale. He was not required to fur- 
nish any ready money, his interest in the business being 
compensated by the personal influence which he was able 
to exert upon General Grant, in obtaining " permits " to 
extend the operations of the firm into the enemy's country. 
It is not improbable that this family arrangement had 
something to do with the notorious order of the General, 
consigning all the Jews within his military district to 
immediate banishment.* 

This propensity to realize out of his relationship to the 
President, and coin his influence into hard cash, has be- 
tra3'ed the old gentleman into many acts of indiscretion. 
Charges have been publicly made against him, not only to 
the fact of his having accepted various sums of money for 
his personal efforts in obtaining office for others, but also of 
black-mailing. These are too direct and circumstantial to 
leave room for doubt. The mail agents of Kentucky 
among others, are said to have an intimate acquaintance 
with his method of doing business. The administration 
has charitably overlooked these little eccentricities of 
character, influenced doubtless by the circumstance 
that latterly Mr. Grant has been prevented by physical 

* After the war Mr. Grant brought suit in the Superior Court of Cincin- 
nati to recover a balance which he claimed to be his due under this co-part- 
nership, but Judge Stover dismissed the action with severe comments upon 

its morale. 



" FRED AND CADET SMITH. ^y 

disability, from giving any personal attention to his 
office. 

Frederick Dent Grant, the son of the President, re- 
ceived his appointment as a Cadet at West Point, also at 
the hands of Mr, Johnson, and was barely squeezed through 
that institution, after having been set back a whole year by 
reason of his failure to reach the educational standard. It 
was on account of the wayward^iess of this yoimg gentle- 
man and the laxity of the stuffed-eared officials regard- 
ing his little extravagances that the school suffered its 
greatest demoralization. 

Young Grant was a prominent member of the hazing 
committee, and as they had no very kindly leanings 
towards the colored cadet Smith, the latter became an 
object of their particular attentions, besides furnishing 
the inspiration for some rather equivocal additions to 
" Benny Havens, O !" All this Smith bore with the forti- 
tude of one who had made up his mind to endure every- 
thing and go straight on to the end! But now came the 
ordeal of a court-martial. He had been accused of false- 
hood and insubordination ! 

Does General Grant remember a circumstance pre- 
liminary to this, which took place one day at the War 
Office? He had just received a letter from West Point 
and " Fred " had told him how surely the colored cadet 
was undermining the traditional barriers of that aristo- 
cratic hot-bed. The President said he was satisfied it 
was too early in the day to educate negroes there ; and 
suggested that some plan be devised to get rid of the in- 
truder! This hint was almost immediately acted upon, 
and a court-martial was ordered to try Smith, and after 
an exhaustive trial Smith was substantially acquitted ! 
What cause is to be assigned for the antipathy of Cadet 
Grant towards this young man ? Is it possible that one 
of his proud origin could be envious of this inoffensive 
member of a despised race ? 

In scholarship they were too far separated to be rivals, 
for they occupied the two extremes ! and as to social 



78 BROTHER-IN-LAW CRAMER. 

position, all that Smith had, was enforced ! Beyond the 
drill-field and the recitation-room, the embryo warriors 
shrank away from him as from an unclean thing. Their 
Caucasian blood rebelled against being cooped up with a 
" nigger," and so young Grant was put forward to use a 
little family influence to purge the institution of the taints 
of the FifteciitJi Amendmei^t ! hence the court-martial. 

After his graduation, so low in the list as almost to be 
lost to view, " Fred " was assigned to the Fourth Cavalry 
with the rank of Second Lieutenant ; but fighting Indians 
not being quite to his taste, he was almost immediately 
detailed {^s usual, contrary to law), upon the staff of Gen- 
eral Sherman, with mcreascd pay, and sent abroad in great 
state, to receive the honors of foreign courts ! Generous 
patronage ! worthy example ! 

The Reverend M. J. Crajner, Minister to Denmark, is a 
native of German}-, and brother-in-law of President Grant. 
From all we have been able learn of Mr. Cramer, he was 
a kind of itinerant preacher, fortune-hunter and adven- 
turer in the West, pretending to much and practicing very 
little Christianity. At any rate, he is said to have been ac- 
customed to mix so much "lager" with his religion as to 
spoil it, without improving the lager. Like many another 
of the same stripe, he cared nothing for this country be- 
yond what he could make out of it, and so when it was 
certain to his mind that General Grant would succeed Mr. 
Johnson in the Presidency, the Rev. Cramer laid in a stock 
of influence by allying himself to the rising famil}^ He was 
soon huiTied out of the country " to look after Leipsic's 
plain " and take his first lesson in diplomacy in that com- 
mercial centre, in the character of U. S. Consul. There 
at least his imperfect knowledge of Enghsh would be com- 
pensated by his familiarity with German. At Leipsic he 
was publicly cowhided in the streets, by a fellow-country- 
man whom he had outraged by his indecent behavior • 
an infliction which those who are acquainted with the 
facts, entirely justify, and which our consul never offered 
to resent. After this rather severe lesson it became ad- 



WHAT THE DANES THINK OF HIM. 7g 

visable to shift the scene of the Reverend Cramer's opera- 
tions and as the country could not well dispense with his 
invaluable services, the head of the family was generous 
enough to offer him as a higher sacrifice at Copenhagen, a 
proposition to which the Honorable Senate yielded its 
obedience ; thereby establishing the precedent that ivJmi 
one has been disgraced as Consul he should be promoted to be 
Minister ! provided always, that he be not only a foreigner, 
but also brother-in-law of the President ! 

Lest our readers should suppose we have in some man- 
ner "exaggerated the case of the reverend gentleman who 
represents the United States Government at Copenhagen, 
we subjoin the following extract from an article in the 
Avisen, a Danish daily journal published at Fiinen. 

"If Mr. Cramer'sdeficient knowledge as a linguist unfits him for his pres- 
ent position, his lack of tact and good breeding are such that the other mem- 
bers of the diplomatic corps hold as little intercourse with him as possible 
And he himself does not feel at home in their refined circle. His tastes are 
those of the lower strata of German Society. His favorite place of resort is 
a small drinking saloon on Kongsholm, where the noble Ambassador 
drinks nightly his schoppens in the midst of German friends, who listen 
admiringly to his recitals of German prowess displayed during the late wars 
in Europe and America. Repeatedly, when in a state of unnatural exhila- 
ration, has he there made insulting remarks to officers of our army in regard 
to their conduct during the war with the Prussians and Austrians in the 
year 1S64— remarks which would have been objectionable in the mouth of • 
a rabid Philo-German ; how much more, then, in that of the American 
Ambassador ! 

" There are rumors of still graver improprieties committed by Mr. Cra- 
mer. Last summer this wonderful diplomatist, it is currently report'ed in 
Copenhagen, made an exhibition of himself at the Tivoli, in the presence 
of a large crowd, not only by the extraordinary drinking capacities he dis- 
played, but still more so by the very questionable company in which he ap- 
peared at that fashionable place of amusement. The Ministers of Russia 
and France ignore him completely, and we believe our Government would 
have long ago informed the Cabinet of Washington that the recall of Mr. Cra- 
mer would be exceedingly welcome, but for fear of offending the President oi 
the United States by pointing out the utter incapacity and objectionable 
conduct of so near a relative of his. To us, however, it seems that our 
Government should not give too much weight to this consideration. The 
fact is, the President of the United States was guilty of a breach of courtesy, 
or of a singular degree of ignorance in sending Mr. Cramer as American 
Ambassador to Copenhagen. No native of Germany, and least of all, no 



8o BROTHER-IN-LAW CASEY — 

German such as Mr. Cramer, should have been sent to this countrj', which 
is still bleeding from wounds wantonly inflicted by German hands." 

The Copenhagen correspondent of the Berlin Vosiscke 
Zcitung, winds up a chapter upon this diplomatic lumi- 
nary as folio ws : 

" The Minister of Foreign Affairs will now demand his immediate recall 
on the ground of his frequent objectionable conduct in public, his quarrel- 
some and overbearing temper, and his habitual intemperance. This step 
is in accordance with public sentiment, and will be approved by none more 
heartily than by the foreign diplomatists, who refuse to have anything to do 
with Mr. Cramer, and who, like many other people here, are surprised that 
he has ever been sent here." 

yames F. Casey, Collector of the Port of New Orleans, 
is also a brother-in-law of the President ! and so far as we 
have been able to ascertain, had no other recommenda- 
tion to office. He is a man of great pretensions and very 
limited capacity. His one idea appears to be, that the 
Public Offices of this country, especially the Collector- 
ships, are so many instruments in the hands of the Ad- 
ministration, to be set in motion and used to effect the 
private aims and especially the re-nomination of his august 
patron, the President ! All the abuses which have been 
shown to flourish in and about the New York Custom 
House under Thomas Murphy, have been and continue 
to be practiced in a magnified form at New Orleans 
under Collector Casey, backed up and encouraged by the 
Executive at Washington ! 

Casey was the prime mover and leader of the seditious 
and insurrectionary outrages perpetrated upon the peo- 
ple of Louisiana on the 9th of August last, when a body 
of United States soldiers and a horde of armed deputy- 
marshals specially authorized, were employed to overawe 
the Republican State Convention at New Orleans, and 
exclude from it all delegates who refused to pledge them- 
selves to the re-nomination of President Grant ! 

Subsequently to this, a large delegation from the lead« 
ing Republicans of the State of Louisiana, hunted up the 



COLLECTOR OF THE PORT OF NEW ORLEANS. 8 1 

President at Long Branch, and requested him on behalf 
of the people of their State to rebuke the meddlesome 
officiousness of Casey by his prompt dismissal from office. 
The President promised to consider the subject and give 
the committee an answer. He did consider it, but his 
answer was given by Casey himself, who caused the dis- 
missal of no less than thirty-two subordinates of the New 
Orleans Custom House ! men who had shown enough of 
honor and patriotism to discourage, if not to resist, the in- 
famous tyranny of the Collector ! 

The avowed purpose of Casey and his Custom House 
gang was to control the election of legislative and State 
officers, so as to secure a majority of incumbents favorable 
to an extension of the Grant dynasty. In this, despite 
the powerful support of the Administration, Casey failed ; 
but there was yet some hope that by repeating the out- 
rages of August, the legislature could be bullied into 
compliance with the demands of the conspirators, in 
spite of Governor Warmoth and his adherents, who con- 
stituted the opposition, and were largely in the majority. 

For this object a coalition was formed between the 
Custom House gang under Casey, and the minority 
party, who styled themselves Democrats, with no very 
definite idea of what was meant b)'' the term, beyond the 
purpose of vociferously and pugilistically sustaiiting Grant 
under the leadership of the Collector. There was only 
one drawback to their plans. Casey could not now, as in 
August, control the action of the Government troops. 
That experiment had become too unpopular for repetition. 
An extra session of the legislature to be convened in 
January, having been called by Governor Warmoth, a 
scheme was concocted to divide that body into two dis- 
tinct legislatures, completely organized and holding their 
deliberations at the same time. It was easily foreseen that 
if this could be brought about, a state of anarchy might 
be declared to exist which would furnish the Executive 
with a pretext for extending the hwnarie benefits of martial 
law over the State. The immediate point to be gained 
6 



82 CASEY WANTS MARTIAL LAW PROCLAIMED. 

was to pledge the President to the interests of the Caseyites 
and this was easily accomplished, for their interests were 
identical. The only doubtful point, is whether Grant in- 
stigated Casey's action, or Casey, Grant's maction ; but 
that there was a perfect understanding between them, to 
the effect that the U. S. troops should not be allowed to 
interfere upon the side of the State authorities, and that 
in a certain event, martial lazv should be declared, no ques- 
tion can remain in the mind of any one who will take the 
trouble to follow out the course of events. But we arc 
not wholly dependent for our conclusions upon the de- 
velopment of the treasonable plot, as the following letter 
from the Hon. E. Butler, Senator of the Fifth District, 
and one of the most influential and respected of the color- 
ed leaders of the Republican party in Louisiana, which 
was published in the New Orleans papers, at about the 
period of its date, will show. 

New Orleans, Dec. 8, 1871. 

" I consider it a duty to make public the following facts, in order that 
President Grant may know how he is misrepresented, if he be so, and that 
the people of the United States, if he be not misrepresented, may learn to 
what desperate extremes the President has determined to go to extend and 
perpetuate his power. 

" Just before the election for Lieutenant-Governor of Louisiana, vice the 
Hon. O. J. Dunn, deceased, the United States Marshal for this State, the 
Hon. S. B. Packard, sought me and stated that I was ruining my future 
prospects by not joining his side, to wit : the Republican minority and 
Democratic coalition ; that it was of no great consequence whether the War- 
moth Republicans elected the Lieutenant-Governor or not, or even if 
Warmoth succeeded in obtaining re-election in 1872, for in that event the) 
had the guarantee of President Gratit that he would at once declare martial law 
and give his political frietids all the offices. He urged me, for these reasons, 
to vote for his candidate, and added that Gen. Reynolds would be in mili- 
tary command here, and everything would be right with him. 

" E. Butler, 
" Senator Fifth Senatorial District 

In order to give color of right to the nefarious projects 
of the conspirators, it was necessary to gain over to their 
side some portion of the officers of the Legislative body 
about to be convened. To this end their persuasions were 



THE VIRTUOUS CARTER. 83 

addressed to the Hon. (?) George W. Carter, Speaker of 
the House, whose virtue was of that accommodating sort 
which is always ready to yield to a reasonable temptation. 
Mr. Carter's virtue 3'ielded in this instance and at the 
same time he found himself suddenly lifted into a Gov- 
ernment office. He was made Inspector of Customs at 
New Orleans under brother-m-law Casey ! for which he 
drew his per diem without rendering any service to 
speak of. 

The history of this infamous tool of the Administration 
IS briefly as follows : He had been a Yankee school- 
teacher and afterwards an itinerant preacher in Missis- 
sippi ; but having become involved in a little affair with a 
lady there, or we might say two little affairs, he fled to 
Texas to avoid a collision with a shot-gun in the hands of 
an indignant father. Espousing the cause of the rebellion 
he became a Confederate Colonel, serving for the most 
part on the Texas frontier. At the cessation of hostili- 
ties, Carter was prevailed upon to give up some very ir- 
regular practices for the place of spy in the secret service 
under Governor Warmoth, who was then a Special Agent 
of the Treasury. When Special Agent Warmoth mi- 
grated to Louisiana, Carter followed him, and managed 
to secure a seat in the Legislature of that State as the re- 
presentative of a country district. By some underhand 
manoeuvres Carter managed to be elected Speaker of 
the House. He is said to have operated upon the fears 
of members, using his old character of a spy, to effect this 
result. Having now some political capital to trade upon, 
Carter lost no time in putting it upon the market. He 
finally sold out to the Custom House gang and from 
thence became identified with them. 

When the Legislature met pursuant to the call of the 
Governor, Carter proceeded to carry the plans of the 
conspirators into effect. Knowing beforehand that an ef- 
fort would be made to oust him from the Speakership, he 
secretly packed the room in the rear of the Speaker's 
chair with an armed mob, and on the passage of a resolu- 



84 LOUISIANA LEGISLATURE MARCHED TO PRISON! 

tion declaring the Speaker's Chair vacant, the mob rushed 
menacingly upon the rostrum ! 

Next followed the third scene of this remarkable drama. 
Governor Warmoth and a sufficient number of Legisla- 
tors known to be opposed to the re-nomination of Gen- 
eral Grant, to destroy the Republican majority in the 
House, and give it into the hands of the coalition, were 
arrested upon warrants issued from the United States 
District Court, and placed in the hands of Marshal Pack- 
ard, the fourth champion of the conspiracy.* 

With the exception of the Governor the arrested par- 
ties were marched off through a military guard, flanked 
with Gatling guns, into the Administration fortress — the 
Custom House ! 

* It was at this stage of the proceedings that the following despatch was 
telegraphed by Governor Warmoth to President Grant : 
" His Excellency U. S. Grant, President : 

" Six Senators of this State, employed in the New Orleans Custom House, 
have formed a conspirac)'^ with the Democratic Senators to prevent a 
quorum of the State Senate, and have succeeded during the entire week. In 
this plot they have the support of the Collector of Customs, the United States 
Marshal, and several of )'our appointees here, and the revenue cutter Wil- 
derness has been and is still employed to take these conspirators beyond 
the reach and jurisdiction of the Sergeant-at-Arms, empowered to arrest 
them in order that a quorum may be secured and public business transacted 
at the moment of the assembling of the House of Representatives to-day. 

" A number of United States Marshals, armed with warrants from a 
United States Commissioner, based on a frivolous affidavit of members of 
the conspiracy, suddenly arrested eighteen Representatives, four Senators, 
the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor. The effect of this was to break the 
Republican majority in the House of Representatives. During the confu- 
sion consequent upon this outrageous proceeding, the conspirators, claim- 
ing to be the "House, but not numbering a quorum of that body, illegally 
ejected six Republican members, and seated in their places Democratic 
contestants. Threats of violence, backed by United States troops to carry 
out the plot, are freely made. 

" I respectfully request to be informed if, as is claimed, you sustain the 
Collector, the Marshal, and other Federal officials in this revolutionary 
attempt to overturn the State Government — an attempt which, if not dis- 
continued by your appointees and their Democratic allies, must result in 
anarchy and bloodshed. 

" H. C. WARMOTH, 

" Governor of Louisiana." 



carter's rival legislature. 85 

And now the work of legislation began in good earnest. 
Several members of the opposition were expelled by the 
newly converted Grant men, and their places filled in a 
manner acceptable to the reigning family ! 

This however, was undone upon the return to their 
seats of the accused members who had been released upon 
bail. It was at this juncture that the rampant Carter and 
his followers withdrew from the State House and set up 
a rival Legislature on their own account, holding their 
mock sessions sometimes at the Custom House and at 
others in a neighboring liquor-saloon^ where day after day 
the bogus Speaker issued the most inflammatory and 
treasonable proclamations ; from the last of which we 
make the following extracts : 

" I, G. W. Carter, Speaker of the House of Representatives, notify all whom 
it may concern that I shall, on Monday the 22d, at 11:30 a. m., through the 
Sergeant-at-Arms of the House over which I preside, proceed to remove 
from the House of Representatives and the approaches thereto the metro- 
politan police and armed men now acting under the illegal orders and di- 
rection of the said H. C. Warmoth, and place said House, with its organi- 
zation, as it existed at the hour of adjournment, Jan. 4 last, intact in its 

hall in the Mechanics' Institute." 

* * 4e- * * 

" I would also warn all police and other armed men now acting in viola- 
tion of law, by order of the said H. C. Warmoth, against resisting the man- 
dates of the House in the premises, and would notify them that no violence 
is to be used against them, except in the case of said illegal resistance ; and 
the citizens are informed that no damage will be done to private property 
and no interference had with the Executive office, and they are respectfully 
requested for the time being to close their places of business and to keep 
off the streets in the vicinity of the Mechanics' Institute, as this measure, 
legal in its character, as a last resort is taken for the protection of public 
rights and the preservation of Republican government in the State of 

Louisiana." 

***** 

" We earnestly invite the citizens, irrespective of race or party, to organ- 
ize and arm themselves as well as they may be able, and report in force 
in the neigborhood of 207 Canal street, where they will be provided with 
the necessary commissions and sworn in as assistant sergeants-at-arms, 
and thus within the law be prepared to protect their rights." 

Whilst Carter was thus engaged in carrying out his 
share of the conspiracy on shore, brother-in-laiv Casey 



86 HIS GANG CLAMOR FOR MARTIAL LAW. 

pressed into his service the United States Revenue Cqi/* 
ter, Wilderness, and placing- on board of her no less than 
seventeen State Senators, seven of iv ho in actually held offices 
in the Custom House, gave orders for the vessel to ply up 
and down the Mississippi, off New Orleans, and within 
sight of the State House. For ten consecutive days she 
was in this way prostituted to the base purposes of the 
Custom House gang, to the utter neglect of her legiti- 
mate service, and the eternal disgrace of those officers 
of the revenue who welcomed their debasement. Mean- 
while the skulking delinquents were rationed from the 
Government stores, and when at length they were com- 
pelled to forsake their floating refuge, they fled ignomin- 
iously to the outlying swamps, to avoid the Sergeant-at- 
arms of the Senate. This was Casey's share in the conspi- 
racy which he contrived, the immediate purpose being to 
forestall the organization of the State Senate, by reduc- 
ing the attendance of members below a quorum. 

In the meanwhile. Carter and his adherents of less than 
a quorum, made daily efforts to gain possession of the 
State House, oftentimes of a threatening and rebellious 
character, which Governor Warmoth by his coolness 
and intrepidity, completely overawed. Long and loud 
they clamored for martial law ! This was indeed the 
stake for which their desperate game had been played ! 
Anarchy first, and martial law afterwards ! Rising from 
their orgies the rebelHous conclave surrounded the quar- 
ters of General Emory, who commanded the U. S. mili- 
tary forces in the District embracing New Orleans, and 
demanded his interference. Instead, however, of deriving 
any consolation from that quarter, the commanding gen- 
eral refused to hold any conference with the mob, and 
afterwards, assured their committee, that he should only 
respond with the forces under his control to a call from 
the Governor for the protection of the " Executive build- 
ing." 

In his further response to the committee, General 
Emory said : 



carter's men in buckram. 87 

" I have no authority in this matter whatever, no more than you have. 
My only authority is this : When I am called upon by the Governor or 
Mayor, or if a riot is raised, by no matter who or what party, I will put it 
down and disperse the rioters with grapeshot. I don't want to do it, be- 
cause if I did I might slaughter a good many innocent people ; but if com- 
pelled I will surely do it. Gentlemen make a great mistake and confound 
my position with what it might have been during the war, when governors 
and legislatures were made and unmade at will. These are not war times, 
when whatever a General said was law. This is a country and State under 
civil law. I have no more right to interfere in this matter than I have to 
go into a bank where I do not like the President and put him out. When 
the Governor calls on me to protect his Executive building, I am bound to 
furnish him with troops. I now have a requisition from him here, in which 
he makes an earnest and immediate call on me, which I am obliged to fill." 

That the highly honorable course of Gen. Emory did 
not meet with the approval of the Executive, is made 
manifest by the altered tone of his later communication of 
the same day, wherein he informed both Warmoth and 
Carter, that he had decided " not to bring the troops 
again into the city during the present imbroglio, unless 
ordered to do so by the United States Government." 

What mysterious agency was set in operation to work 
this sudden change ? Surely conspirators require no 
greater encouragement than the indifference of govern- 
ment to the accomplishment of their aims, and this much 
they had gained. The plans of Carter were soon taken. 
He enhsted and swore into office {?) some five hundred 
assistant sergeants-at-arms, but when he came to rally 
them for the service in hand, less than one hundred, men 
and boys, made their appearance, only to be dismissed at 
the instance of their leader, who doubtless considered the 
condemned muskets which they had stolen from the 
mihtia, an inferior sort of scare for a man like Governor 
Warmoth ! Thus all attempts on the part of the uncon- 
ditional Grant men to obtain possession of the State House 
had failed, and notwithstanding the bluster of armed 
ruffians and the deliberate murder of an inoffensive mem- 
ber of the Legislature in the person of the Hon. W. B. 
Wheyland, martial law had not been proclaimed ; and so 
the recusant Senators came forth from the swamps and 



88 CASEY RETAINED IN OFFICE. 

took their seats, and the three government-officers who 
headed the conspiracy to overthrow the State Govern- 
ment of Louisiana, returned to their haunts at the Custom 
House, to be commended by their considerate master, and 
accursed of the people ! 

A more flagrant use of power and a greater perversion 
of justice, and the trust reposed in its guardians, than are 
to be found in the outrages committed by brother-in-laiv 
Casey and his coadjutors at New Orleans, have never, we 
venture to say, been brought to light, since the organiza 
tion of our Government. 

If the part which they enacted in the conspiracy to 
overthrow the rightfully constituted authorities of the 
State Government, and set up a bogus Legislature be not 
rebellion, it is treason ! Rebellion it was declared to be in 
the instance of Governor Dorr, of Rhode Island, who was 
tried, convicted and condemned to imprisonment and 
hard labor, for a less offence, whilst brother-in-law Casey 
is hugged all the closer in the family embrace / 

Just before the meeting of the recent Philadelphia Con- 
vention, a rumor was industriously circulated that Casey 
had been requested by the Executive, to resign his office ; 
and being notoriously incompetent as well as politically 
corrupt, the object of the rumor was accomplished by its 
being generally believed to be true, notwithstanding the 
circumstance of Casey's late friendly visit to the White 
House, and his drunken orgies with the President there 
were well-known. 

The rest of the programme of the resignation was given 
to the public after the Philadelphia Convention had done 
its allotted work. It was then that a committee from one 
of the outer rings of the New Orleans Custom House 
formally waited upon the President, on behalf of the 
small office holders there, and earnestly entreated him to 
pocket the resignation of Casey, and not permit the annual 
subsidy of fifty thousand dollars to go out of the family ! 

This circumstance was also prominently set forth in the 
Government organs ! 



COUSIN LAMPER A FINANCIER. 85 

Dr, F. M. Lamper, second cousin of the President, re- 
ceived an early appointment as Ganger of Whisky at 
the City of Chicago, but having been detected by Collec- 
tor Jussen, in the commission of " frauds " upon the 
revenue, he was at the instance of that gentleman dismis- 
sed from his office. But the irregularities of Lamper, so 
far from exciting the Executive disfavor, furnished only 
another reason for his official preferment, and, as in the 
case of the Reverend Cramer, Lamper was removed from 
temptation in Chicago and promoted to the office of Re- 
ceiver and Sub-Treasurer at Olympia, in Washington 
Territory. 

It would appear, however, from what has transpired, 
that the thievish propensities of Dr. Lamper, instead ol 
being cured by the enlarged opportunities which his new 
office afforded for their exercise, have actually been in- 
dulged in to a greater extent than might reasonably have 
been anticipated, even from one who had previously 
shown himself such an adept at conveying the funds of 
the Government into his own pocket ! 

Rumors of his peculiar financial transactions having 
reached the Treasury Department, a Special Agent was 
despatched to Washington Territory to make official 
inquiry into their truth. 

The result of his investigation revealed the unquestion- 
able fact, that the speculative Dr. lacked some thirty or 
forty thousand dollars to make up his balances ; but, ow- 
ing we presume to his relationship to the President, the 
Agent in charge was so indulgent as to delay his report a 
sufficient period to enable the unfortunate delinquent to 
make good his accounts, which he contrived to do, where- 
upon the Agent reported the office to be in a satisfactory 
condition, with thirty-nine thousand dollars on hand to the 
credit of the Government, and, returning to its incum^ 
bent the key of the money safe, took his departure. 

After the lapse of some months, but before any share oi 
this money had been drawn upon. Dr. Lamper tendered his 
resignation, which was accepted ; but, when he came to 



90 



BROTHER ORVIL. 



turn over to his successor the properties in his custody- 
belonging to the United States, the key to the combina- 
tion lock of the money-safe was claimed to be lost, which 
necessitated the sending of the safe to San Francisco to 
be opened ! 

In the meantime the enterprising Dr.* left for parts un- 
Known. Afterward when the safe was opened, it is reported 
and currently believed, that the most, if not all of the 
thirty-nine thousand dollars deposited there had disap- 
peared ! 

We have not yet heard that Cousin Lamper has 
been appointed to a higher and more lucrative office than 
his last ! 

Orvil L. Grant, of Chicago, the President's brother, is 
perhaps his only male near-of-kin relative who has not 
been made the recipient of a government office ; but if 
we are to place any reliance upon a complication of facts 
concerning which Orvil himself is a leading witness, we 
must conclude that at first it was-his choice to hold a kind 
of supervisory care over various offices within a conve- 
nient range of his leather-store ; and inasmuch as the testi- 
mony of Orvil is conclusive upon this head, we prefer 
that he should be permitted to give it in his own simple 
and ingenuous way. The . following extract is from his 
letter to the President of the date mentioned : 

Chicago, 111., June i8, 1870, 
" Dear Brother : The matter that I referred to in my note, and which I 
expected Dr. Lamper to explain to you, was in reference to a proposition 
made by Gen. Bloomfield to the distillers who have been evading the law, 
and whose distilleries were seized. Mr. Crosby, who is Gen. Bloomfield's 
confidential assistant, was authorized to make overtures to the distillers, 
and for a certain sum of money, $20,000, paid into the hands of any man 
whom they might select, he (Bloomfield) would place with the man all 
papers and evidence he had against the distillers, with positive assurances 
rtiat the cases would not be prosecuted. Crosby was afraid to approach 
.he distillers, as it might have a bad effect, and proposed to me that if I 

* This is the Dr. Lamper who is mentioned in the well known letter of 
Orvil L. Grant to his brother, the President, wherein he severely arraigns 
Jie office-holders of Chicago. 



HIS BROKERAGE IN PUBLIC OFFICES. 9 1 

would act as a third party and get the distillers to raise the money, I was ta 
retain part as my fee. I felt, of course, suspicious about the honesty of his 
intentions, and thought it might be a ruse to see whether I would loan my- 
self for such work or not, and I gave him to understand that unless I had 
positive assurances that Bloomfield would carry out, in good faith, all that 
was proposed, that nothing could be done."* 

Mr. Edmund Jussen, formerly Collector of the Port of 
Chicago, under Grant, has furnished us with some addi- 
tional proofs of Orvil's peculiar talents, in a letter to the 
Chicago Tribune. H e says : 

" A few months after taking charge of the duties of my office, the brother 
of the President, Orvil Grant, Esq., honored me with a call, talked revenue 
business generally, and quite fluently, and finally invited me to his store. 
He repeated this invitation three or four times, once by letter, before I 
complied with his request. When I visited his store, Mr. Grant, though 
somewhat embarrassed, but on the whole, with the graceful air of an ac- 
complished business man, proposed to me to join him in defrauding the 
Government by permitting a certain distillery to run double its registered 
capacity, or, in other words, to collect the tax for only one-half of its actual 
product. ' If you decline,' said the acute gentleman, ' the Government will 
gain nothing, for, in that event, the distillery will not increase its product. 
If you consent, the same tax which you now collect will still be paid, and 
the receipts of the Government will therefore not be diminished. A few 
barrels more or less on the market cannot depress quotations, and the 
competitors who do not enjoy the privileges I ask for my friends cannot 
suffer. There can therefore really be no fraud in the transaction proposed. 
Moreover, I shall see to it that all is safe in Washington.' "f 

Brother Orvil's brokerage in frauds having become un- 
popular if not unprofitable, from exposure, he next brought 
his influence to bear to obtain the Collectorship of Chicago ; 
but the earnest protests of the merchants and business- 
men of that city were poured in such numbers upon the 
Executive, that even family reasons operated against him. 
The next move of Orvil was to secure the appointment of 
his inefl&cient and incompetent business partner, Mr. James 
E. McLean, to this office, which was effected ; and it has 
been repeatedly charged without denial, that the profits 

* General Bloomfield declined to carry out the bargain between Grant 
and Crosby, and was dismissed from office. 

\ Mr. Jussen who refused to become a party to this ingenious scheme, 
also lost his office. 



92 ORVILS PARTNER COLLECTOR OF CHICAGO. 

of the office are carried into common stock with hides and 
leather, and the pay and emoluments thereof divided 
equally between the partners, according to a bargain be- 
forehand which the President recognized. 

We might pursue these investigations further and point 
out one after another, the additional twenty or thirty rela- 
tions of our Republican President, who have been prevail- 
ed upon to give the country the benefit of their invaluable 
services in various capacities, ranging from Ministers at 
Foreign courts, to under-clerks in the Departments at 
Washington ; but we are restrained for two reasons, 
which ought to be satisfactory to our readers. In the first 
place we do not believe that the biographies of many of 
these worthies would afford a very striking illustration of 
virtue and its reward, or largely tend to the cultivation 
of political morals on the part of the ambitious youth of 
this "great and growing country," and in the second 
place, this book must have an end. 



CHAPTER , 

THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

Projects of Acquisition. — Who inaugurated the idea. — Early history. — Con- 
spiracies and revolutions. — Baez elected President. — He is banished the 
country. — Cabral made President. — Is ousted by Baez. — Baez seizes the 
reins of government. — Political divisions of the island. — Baez chosen 
President in 1849. — General Babcock appointed Special Agent by Pres- 
ident Grant to reconnoitre the position. — Naval order. — Pursuit of 
steamer Telegrafo. — General Babcock's instructions. — A remarkable 
spectacle. — Case of Mr. Davis Hatch. — Consul Smith recalled. — General 
Babcock hobnobbing. — Hatch accused of writing for the papers- — Extra- 
ordinary powers of the Special Agent. — His orders to the war vessels. — 
Baez wants money and guns. — General Babcock and his tandem team. 
— Perry appointed Commercial Agent. — Fabens and Cazneau " turn up" 
again. — Hatch tried and sentenced to be shot. — Hatch pardoned, but not 
released. — Babcock pretends to believe Hatch guilty. — Perry believes 
Hatch innocent. — Hatch'sya/^r discovered at last. — Baez wants " to see" 
Babcock (!) and make it right. — Babcock's holy horror at the idea. — The 
Dominican vote on annexation. — How conducted. — Babcock's head- 
quarters on board the Albany. — He directs the movements of the fleet. — 
"Secretary" to whom? — Perry exhorted to play third fiddle. — Perry's 
position. — President Grant takes the field. — Senator Sumner the first 
victim. — The Dominicans reluctantly accept annexation. — Extracts from 
Reports of the Commission. — General Ingalls's testimony. Cost of the 
experiment. 

The attention of this Government had been directed 
to the acqui.sition of certain harbor rights in the West 
Indies during the administration of Mr. Johnson, under 
whose direction a Commission was sent out to inspect the 
harbors of Saint Thomas and Santo Domingo. Forming, 
as this latter island does, one of the more prominent of 
the West India group, and lying in the course of the 
great oceanic highway between the nations of Europe 
and Southern America, it was deemed a matter of sub- 
stantial benefit to the commerce of this nation, more espe- 
cially in the event of war with either of the great mari- 

(93) 



94 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

time powers of the world, that we should secure to our 
selves an intermediate station for naval supplies and a 
refuge for our ships, of whatever class, from the perils of 
hostile fleets. 

Notwithstanding the failure of the Commission under 
Mr. Johnson to accomplish the desired end, either with 
St. Thomas or Santo Domingo, the project, which had 
been suffered merely to slumber rather than to die out, 
was revived with wider aims and unusual persistency by 
the present Executive, in whose hands, instead of the 
contemplated purchase of limited harbor facilities, it grew 
to be a scheme of annexation, and included the whole ol 
the Dominican republic. 

Precisely how and through what agencies this whole- 
sale endeavor was set on foot, the evidences before us 
are by no means clear. It is asserted by Mr. Smith, late 
United States Consul at San Domingo, that, first at the 
instance of President Cabral, and later by request of Baez 
he forwarded to Mr. Seward, then Secretary of State 
offers of annexation, coupled with the proposed assump- 
tion of obligations upon the part of our Government, of 
such a nature as to forbid of their being seriously enter- 
tained.* 

On a careful review of the subject, we are led to the 
conclusion, that without having any direct connection 
with any previous negotiations, the present project was 
inaugurated by a number of American citizens, who hav- 
ing acquired certain grants and franchises under the favor 
of Baez, were anxious to extend over them the protection 
of a strong government, whereby great and substantial 
value would be added to possessions almost worthless, 
owing to the precarious tenure by which they were held. 

It should be borne in mind that whilst the eastern, and 
by far the greater portion of the Island of San Domingo, 
is held by the Dominican government, the western divi 
sion forms the Republic' of Hayti, the exact boundary 
between the two being to this day a subject of dispute, 

* S**^ Howard's Report, pp. 15S-9. The offer required protection to Baez 



CONSPIRACIES AND REVOLUTIONS. 95 

and the frequent cause of organized demonstrations of a 
threatening and warlike nature. 

It has been customary to speak of these two powers as 
Republics, but more by courtesy than by any rule or sys- 
tem appertaining to their respective governments, which 
are in fact little else than military despotisms. 

Forming the seat of the first colony planted in the 
Western hemisphere by Columbus, San Domingo thus 
early became a province of Spain. 

In the middle of the seventeenth century a band of 
French buccaneers obtained a lodgment upon the west- 
ern coast, and under the patronage of the French govern- 
ment, being reinforced and sustained by a liberal policy, 
they advanced to a degree of prosperity hitherto un- 
known in that remote region ; until, by a general revolt, 
the enslaved blacks overwhelmed and nearly extermina- 
ted their white oppressors, and finally, after a long period 
of warfare, with its attendant cruelties and vicissitudes, 
they succeeded in extending their dominion over the 
whole island. 

Subsequently, France made an unsuccessful attempt 
to regain her lost possessions, but after the lapse of more 
than twenty years, she was induced to acknowledge the 
independence of the negro government. 

Naturally enough, during this turbulent period, the in- 
dustrial arts had been almost wholly neglected, and now 
that their freedom was established, there was little dispo- 
sition on the part of a race who had always associated 
labor with dependency, to voluntarily resume their old 
pursuits. To their minds, liberty and idleness were synon- 
ymous terms. In vain the Code Rural rooted the laborer 
to the soil and required him to devote a specified share 
of each work-day to its culture. His slightest exertion 
was sufficient to secure subsistence, and no amount of 
coaxing or crowding could induce him to exceed it. 

An inevitable sequence of a state of things so reckless 
and demoralizing, was the gradual decay and final aban- 
donment of the valuable plantations of sugar and coffee 



96 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

which had theretofore formed the principal sources ol 
income and revenue.* 

The subsequent history of San Domingo is chequered 
with conspiracies and revolutions, for the most part under 
the leadership of reckless adventurers, whose ambition 
seems to have been controlled by no worthier impulse 
than that of trading upon her misfortunes and squander- 
ing her revenues. 

It was at the end of five years of anarchy, consequent 
upon the expulsion of the Haytian powers, that, by the 
choice of the electoral college, Baez was placed at the 
head of the Dominican Republic, and what would ap- 
pear strange in almost any other country, his administra- 
tion is the only one in its history which has been allowed 
to continue to the end of its constitutional term. 

At the end of this, his first official term, and almost im- 
mediately after his retirement, Baez was banished the coun- 
try by the decree of his successor, a prerogative which 
inheres to that species of repubhcanism prevalent in San 
Domingo. Nor would it be at all flattering to the mis- 
chief-making abilities of a deposed chief to permit him to 
withdraw to his estates and enjoy the luxury of a fresh 
revolution. Hence it is that an occasional foreign tour is 
considered essential to his political training, and not un- 
frequently results in his sudden recall by general accla- 
mation, of which he has only to avail himself with alac- 
rity to attain once more the summit of popular favor, as 
surely to lose it again in another relapse of indignation. 

The normal state of anarchy which ensued upon the 
close of the Baez administration, gave renewed assurance 
that the warring factions had undergone no change in 
their preconceived notions of self-government, and after 
eight years* continuance of this popular pastime, the suc- 
cessor of Baez, wearied of its monotony, succeeded in 

* As an evidence of this, the amount of sugar exported in the year 1806, 
two years after the breaking out of the revolution, was 47,516,531 lbs., and 
in 1825, when the independence of the Dominican blacks was acknowl- 
edged by France, it had dwindled away to a total of 2020 lbs. 



BAEZ SEIZES THE REINS OF GOVERNMENT. 97 

shifting the burthen of empire upon the shoulders of 
Spain, whose army of 35,000 soldiery took possession of 
Dominica and held it tributary to the Spanish crown. 

But scarcely had the novelty of the situation worn 
away, when a guerrilla warfare was inaugurated against 
the intruders, which terminated in their expulsion after 
the severest losses through inaccessible foes and the 
more fatal ravages of coast fever. The populace were 
almost immediately thereafter involved in new revolu- 
tions, under petty chieftains who had come to regard 
almost any condition preferable to a state of quietude. 

The Spanish occupation was succeeded by a military 
triumvirate, which in its turn gave place to another sys- 
tem of temporary rule, and after various experiments in 
setting up the semblances of government, the adherents of 
General Cabral forcibly expelled the acting President, and 
by a popular election secured their leader at the head of 
affairs. This movement, however, served only to visit the 
State with new complications without allaying the comba- 
tive turbulency of the factions, and Cabral, in his turn, was 
forced to surrender an office so precariously held, to the 
military forces of Baez, towards whom he had previously 
manifested feeble alternations of enmity and regard.* 

Having been in the past alternately banished and re- 
called, accordingly as his popularity rose and fell with the 
varying opinions of the constituency, may we not ven- 
ture the assertion that Baez once more seized the reins 
of government with a determination never again to com- 
mit them into the hands of Dominican leaders, who had 
shown themselves not only bankrupt in morals, but bar- 
ren of justice? 

* Howard's Rep. Testimony of J. Somers Smith, p. 148. 



98 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

The Dominican territory is divided into five prov- 
inces and two districts, each one of which is presided 
over by a Governor, who is appointed by the executive, 
and removable at his pleasure. 

The President is theoretically chosen by an Electoral 
College, with a constitutional term of six years. 

In like manner, a Vice-President is provided for, with 
intermediate periods of election ; but, as there are no 
functions appertaining to his office, he is merely held in 
reserve to supply a possible vacancy, which, we may 
state, he has never yet been permitted to do. 

It was in the year 1849 that Buenaventura Baez was 
chosen President by the Electoral College. His imme- 
diate successor was likewise elected, under whose admin- 
istration the Spanish occupation was consummated. 
Since the withdrawal of the Spanish troops, the needless 
formality of an election has been dispensed with, the cus- 
tomary usurpation of dictatorial powers better suiting 
those bellicose adventurers, to whose selfish aims neither 
constitutions nor laws are allowed to oppose any serious 
obstacle. The conduct of Baez forms no exception to 
the rule. Viewed in the most favorable light, he stands 
before the world to-day a usiirper, and his selfish exercise 
of power is no less tyrannical than that of his prede- 
cessors.* 

It was by this man that the more recent offer of annexa- 
tion was made to this Government ; and, in response to 

* "When Senator Cole was in San Domingo," says Mr. Smith, late U. S 
Consul, " I stood on my balcony with him, and said, ' Senator, do you sea 
that house? The owner of that house is in banishment. I pointed him to 
another. Do you see that house ? There are two out of that house in 
banishment. From the house I live in, father and son are in banishment. 



GENERAL BABCOCK'S INSTRUCTIONS. 99 

that offer, General Babcock was sent out from the Pre- 
sidential Mansion to reconnoitre the position. His written 
instructions from the Secretary of State embraced a wide 
range of inquiry. In addition to these, he was the bearer 
of a letter of credence from the President of the United 
States, to President Baez, through which means these 
two official heads of governments were brought into 
secret negotiation — one to buy and the other to sell out 
his country l'^ 

Nor was there any such squeamishness on the part of 
Mr. Secretary Fish, as had been shown by Mr. Seward, 
as to the attitude assumed by this nation in lending its 
batteries to the enforcement of the bargain. 

Under date of July loth, before the departure of Gen- 
eral Babcock, we find the Secretary of the Navy dispatch- 
ing the U. S. steamer Seminole, then lying in Hampton 
Roads, under orders to proceed, without delay, to the 
bay of Samana, to search for and seize the steamer Tele- 
graph, and conduct her, together with her officers and 
crew, into the port of Baltimore.f 

A supplementary order, dated the 13th of the same 
month, directs the commander of the Seminole as fol- 
lows : 

" You will remain at Samana, or on the coast of San 
Domingo, while General Babcock is there, and give him 
the moral support of your guns. 

" General Babcock goes out in the Tybee, with instruc- 
tions from the President, which you will afford him every 
facility to carry out 

" In case you fall in with the Nipsic, or any other of 
our vessels of war, you will direct the commander to 
accompany General Babcock, and proceed yourself to 
carry out your original orders. I desire that you should 
extend every attention and facility to General Babcock 
while in the execution of his present duty." 

Again, as late as August 23d, some four weeks subse- 
quent to the departure of General Babcock upon his mis- 
sion, and whilst he still remained in San Domingo, the 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 137, 189. f Howard's Rep., p. 38. 



100 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

following order was telegraphed from the Navy Depart- 
ment to Commander Queen, at Key West, Florida, to 
wit : 

*' Direct a vessel to proceed, without a moment's delay, 
to San Domingo City, to be placed at the disposal of 
General Babcock while on that coast. If not at San 
Domingo City, to find him."* 

It is not to be disputed that the steamer Telegrafo, 
which it was one of the objects of this naval expedition 
to capture, was in the interest of the Cabral faction, then 
in open and armed rebellion against the government of 
Baez : but that she was, in any sense, a " pirate," or that 
she had committed any grave offence against the law of 
nations, is by no means established. It is worthy of note, 
that this vessel was commanded by Luperon, formerly 
one of the triumvirate, in which the supreme rule was 
lodged, after its surrender by Spain, and that General 
Pujol, but recently a plenipotentiary to this Government 
under Cabral, to sell the harbor of Samana, was also on 
board ; so that, after all, her naval status was of a piece 
with the customary revolutionary warfare which prevails 
in Dominica, and which usually precedes a change in her 
ministers of state.f 

Whilst we are called upon to applaud the patriotism 
evinced by this Government in dispatching a good share 
of its navy to pursue and capture this wayward little 
steamer, which threatened, with her one gun, to totally 
upset and put to rout the " Monroe doctrine," to which 
the President, in his Message, so feelingly alludes, we can- 
not refrain from calling attention to the unfortunate con- 
trast which is displayed in the hair-trigger zeal of this 
single case, and the weak remonstrances, amounting al- 
most to indifference, in relation to other, and, by far, more 
serious offences committed upon our flag in the same 
waters. 

General Babcock informs us that he had " various con- 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 38, 39. 

f Testimony of Consul Smith. Howard's Rep., pp. 155, 156. 



GENERAL BABCOCK'S INSTRUCTIONS. lOI 

versations with the President," as to the matter in hand, 
in the course of which that official stated, " that a 
number of parties had reported to him that there was a 
desire on the part of the people of San Domingo to be- 
come annexed to the United States ;" that, according to 
the evidence in the State Department, only a portion of 
the Government officials there favored annexation, and 
that the President of the Republic was opposed to 
it. General Babcock was to proceed to the Domini- 
can capital and confer with Baez in person ; and, in 
the event of his opposition to the project, to take a 
home passage on the return voyage of the out-going 
steamer.* 

But General Grant, in his Message of April 5, 1871, 
communicating the Report of the Commission of Enquiry, 
asserts that soon after his inauguration as President, " he 
was waited upon by an agent of President Baez, with a 
proposition to annex the Republic of San Domingo to 
the United States ;" that, in the course of time, he 
'' was waited upon by a second gentleman from San 
Domingo, who made the same representations." 

We shall make no attempt to reconcile these opposite 
statements. 

The steamer Tybee, upon which General Babcock took 
passage, was owned by the New York firm of Spot 
ford, Tilcston & Co., and run in regular trips to San 
Domingo under a subsidiary contract with that Govern- 
ment.f 

Previous to his departure, this firm had made the ten- 
der of a free passage to any agent of this Government in 

* Howard's Rep. pp. 35, 36. 

f The list of grants and concessions furnished the Commissioners by 
M. M. Gautier, Minister of the Interior, states this subsidy to be Jive per 
cent, of all the import or export duties upon merchandise brought or car- 
ried to and from Dominican ports by the steamers of this company; 
and the Commissioners, in their published report, have reiterated this 
statement. (Report of Commissioners, pp. 29, 1S4.) But, by reference to 
the grant itself, it will be seen that the rate agreed upon is fifteen per cent, 
instead of five. (lb. p. iSS, Art. 3d.) 



102 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

the interest of annexation, which, for prudential reasonSv 
was declined.* 

Another circumstance connected with this voyage was 
the unlooked (!) for companionship of Messrs. J. W. Fabens 
and J. P.' O'Sullivan, two zealous advocates of the an- 
nexation project, whose volunteered information regard- 
ing the state of public and private affairs in San Domingo, 
if not the most reliable, was certainly conducive to a 
favorable view of its territorial acquisition' 

Here, then, at the very threshold of this business, are 
we confronted with the remarkable spectacle of a major 
of engineers, with the brevet rank of brigadier-general, 
in the military service of his country, detailed for duty 
about the person of the President, in defiance of law, and 
by him constituted a special agent to ascertain the private 
views of the so-called President of a neighboring State — 
himself a usurper — regarding the annexation to this 
Union of the territory over which he presided ! Nor 
this alone, but attended and sustained in this duty by 
no less than three ships of war, at a period too, when 
the relations between the two countries were friend- 
ly, and while there was an accredited representative 
of our own Government resident at the Dominican 
capital ! 

On his arrival in San Domingo, General Babcock was 
induced to engage Mr. W. L. Cazneau as interpreter, in 
his intercourse with President Baez, who unhesitatingly 
assured th& general of his hearty co-operation with the 
annexation movement, and that among others, his fellow 
passenger, Mr. J. W. Fabens, had but recently pressed 
the subject upon the attention of the President of the 
United States, in the capacity of an authorized agent, a 
circumstance which seems to have been hitherto withheld 
from his knowledge. f 

* Howard's Rep. p. 36. 

f " He told me that Mr. Fabens had come to this country with his entire 
approbation in the representations he had made to this government, as to 
his wish and the wish of his government to be annexed. ' It appears that 



CASE OF MR. DAVIS HATCH. IO3 

» 

At this period the United States was represented at 
the Port of San Domingo by J. Somers Smith, a gentle- 
man ripe in years and experience, having for the most 
part served as Consul for this Government at different 
places of commercial importance for thirty years; but 
General Babcock, with a prudence rarely excelled by the 
most subtle diplomat, carefully withheld from Mr. Smith 
any knowledge of the official character of his visit, al- 
though it has been shown that he ventured to call upon 
him in an informal sort of a way two or three times dur- 
ing his sojourn of forty-eight days at his consular station ! 
Moreover, they sometimes accidentally met at govern- 
ment head-quarters. On one of these occasions a discus- 
sion of a very warm and animated nature arose between 
Baez and Mr. Smith relative to Mr. Davis Hatch, an 
American citizen of high character, theretofore largely 
engaged in mining and mercantile pursuits at Barahona, 
and whom Baez accused of being in the interest of 
Cabral.* 

When Mr. Smith retired from the unequal contest, the 
subject was continued in a friendly and confiding spirit, 
in the course of which Baez related the particulars of the 
arrest of Mr. Hatch and the causes which induced it, and 
received the comforting assurance from our special agent, 
that in view of the grave offences attributed to that gen- 
tleman, it was not likely that the United States govern- 
ment " would in any way interfere in the case." 

" Once or twice during the conversation, he (Baez) re- 
ferred to Mr. Hatch, and to the part Mr. Smith, in the 
interest of Mr. Hatch, had taken, and I invariably an- 
swered, that if he had any charges against Mr. Hatch, he 
must make them out in writing and send them to the 
State Department in Washington ; that / had no au- 
thority to treat on any such case whatever ;" says Gen- 
he (Fabens) was one of the parties who had come here and made such rep- 
resentations,' but President Grant had not told mc that at the time." How- 
ard's Rep., p. 36. Testimony of Babcock. 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 36 and 37. 



104 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

eral Babcock, in his testimony before the Senate Com- 
mittee. 

It was made apparent to him at this interview, that 
Baez and his Cabinet "had no kind feelings towards" 
Consul Smith, " so far as annexation was concerned." 
They even accused him, as they had accused Mr. Hatch, 
of " being in the interest of Cabral ;" and it is probable 
with an equal degree of justice. 

Without observing any indications in the conduct or 
bearing of Mr. Smith confirmatory of the suspicions un- 
der which he rested, and without requiring any proof 
of an accusation so injurious to his reputation as a minis- 
terial officer. General Babcock did not hesitate to suggest 
his recall as an impediment to the successful accomplish- 
ment of an enterprise concerning which, from a simple 
gleaner of information, he thus early became an uncom- 
promising partisan.* And so when Mr. Smith, encour- 
aged by the uniform he wore, but still ignorant of the 
high powers with which he was invested, appealed to 
General Babcock to exert his influence in behalf of a fel- 
low countryman, who had been plundered of his prop- 
erty and thrown into prison by the revolutionary forces 
of an irresponsible government, he coolly declines to 
make any effort in that direction !f 

It will be observed with no little astonishment, that 
throughout the hobnobbing of General Babcock with the 
Dominican authorities, and those accomplished courtiers, 
Fabens and Cazneau, there was a purposed concealment 
from Mr. Consul Smith, not only of his official character, 
but also of the object and plans of this government re- 
garding annexation. 

Hence it was that Baez, in his Sunday-morning arraign- 
ment of Mr. Hatch, made no allusion to his arrest, until 
the retirement of our Consul, when he imparted all the 
particulars to General Babcock, through the channel of 
his interpreter, who, it may be fairly presumed, was al- 
ready famihar with them. If he had received our Consul 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 37, 38. f Howard's Rep., pp. 38, 42, 43. 



HATCH WRITING FOR THE PAPERS. IO5 

with rudeness, and put him off with deception, there was 
a kind of atonement in the affable good nature and free 
confidence evinced towards the Special Agent of the 
United States. 

It would seem from what followed, that Baez fairly in- 
vited a draft upon his generosity, if only to demonstrate 
his good will towards the harbinger of that political mil- 
lenium which, to his mind, was upon the eve of consum- 
mation. He would thus have relieved himself of further 
responsibility in so delicate a matter as the arrest and im- 
prisonment of an American subject upon grounds of 
doubtful validity, a thing we apprehend he was just then 
extremely anxious to do.* But every overture in this 
direction was met with a disclaimer of any authority to 
act in the premises, even to the extent of making a re- 
quest ; which no true American could have refrained from 
making. 

Was it necessary for our Special Agent, not only to 
decline to take any action in the case of Mr. Hatch, but 
to interpose a real obstacle to the speedy adjustment of his 
difficulties ? Was he quite ready to ignore the presence 
and office of the United States Consul at the Dominican 
capital ? 

If not, why was it that he instructed President Baez 
that the only course for him to pursue was one which re- 
quired the transfer of negotiations and adjustment to 
Washington, f whereby weeks and months of time would 
be consumed in diplomatic scolding and coquetry. 

The conclusion is foregone, even without the additional 
proof, which was afterwards furnished. A plan of perse- 
cution had been devised towards Mr. Hatch, with the 
sole object of withdrawing him from the annexation con- 
test, for " could not the villain write ?" and might he not 

" explain a thing till all men doubt it, 

And write about it, goddess, and about it !" 

Mr. Smith was not advised of the arrest of Mr. Hatch 

* Howard's Rep., p. 37. \ Howard's Rep., p. 37. 



I06 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

until a much later period, nor was the fact then commu- 
nicated to him by the authorities who caused it. 

When he sought such information as his office entitled 
him to receive, he Avas turned away by the heads of de- 
partment, one after another, as empty as he came, nor did 
Baez hesitate, according to his own confession, to hide 
the truth under the cover of a falsehood.* 

But the most astonishing feature of this whole enter- 
prise, and one which is altogether unprecedented in the 
annals of diplomacy, is to be found in the deputation of 
some of the highest powers of government to an irrespon- 
sible agent, holding a temporary residence at the capital 
of a foreign state, and the partial transfer of those powers 
to the chief officer of that state ! 

General Babcock tells us that the first knowledge our 
Consul obtained " that he had any official capacity on the 
island," was upon the arrival in port, on the 2d of Sep- 
tember, of the United States steamer, " Tuscarora," whose 
commander, in obedience to his instructions, reported to 
him at San Domingo City. 

It was upon the evening of the same day that Mr. 
Smith, now for the first time comprehending the real 
state of affairs, requested General Babcock to send the 
Tuscarora to look after the fortunes of Mr. Hatch, but 
that gentleman had other uses for the " moral support " 
of her guns ! " I told him," says General Babcock, " that 
Mr. Hatch had been interfering with the rebellion in that 
country, and that I should have nothing to do with the 
case."f Should any doubt remain in the minds of our 
readers as to which of the two governments this " Sec- 
retary to the President and Special Agent" was serving, 
or in whose service the Tuscarora was actually employed, 
the instructions by him issued to Captain Queen, over 
his aforesaid signature, dated the 4th of September, will 
set them at rest. We extract the following passages from 
that interesting document : 

" It is the opinion of the President of the Republic of 

* Howard's Rep., p. 38. f Howard's Rep., pp. 39, 40. 



babcock's orders to the war vessels. 107 

San Domingo, that the sale of the Telegrafo, if sold, was 
simply in form ; that she still belongs to the same parties, 
and that she is to be used against this Republic." * * * ^ 

" If she has been released, and you are satisfied that she 
belongs to the same parties, I think you will be justified 
in seizing her and disposing of her as directed by the 
Secretary of the Nav}^." * * * * * 

" On securing this information, you will please return 
here and inform t/tts Government of the destination of the 
Telegrafo, and such other information concerning her as 
you may think proper. The information can be com- 
municated to President Baez through General W. L. 
Cazneau." 

" On your cruise, after leaving here, after reporting 
the information requested to President Baez, you will 
please touch at Samana and Porto Plata ; a few hours at 
each place will be sufficient." 

Two days after the issuing of this order, having ac- 
complished his mission. General Babcock set sail on his 
return voyage to Washington. 

We have shown that Baez was a usurper — that he over- 
came the government of General Cabral, who held the 
office of President by virtue of a popular vote, through 
military force, and held it by the same means ; and that, 
at the period of General Babcock's visit, Cabral was at 
the head of a revolutionary party, in actual possession of 
one of the strongholds of the Republic. 

How, then, will the people of the United States relish 
the compact of its Chief Magistrate, guaranteeing the 
safety of the Baez government, in order that he and his 
ministers might be able to carry into effect the bargain 
of annexation ? 

You will find it in the protocol, which was to have 
been forever veiled from the public gaze and wrapped 
in " inviolable secrecy." Nay, more, you will find how 
" Orville E. Babcock, aide-de-camp to his Excellency 
General Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States 
of America, and his special agent to the Dominican Re- 
public," contracted and agreed, in the name and on behalf 
Df the President, that he should privately use all his in- 



Io8 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

fluence with members of Congress to popularize the idea 
of annexing the Dominican Republic to the United 
States, and that he would withhold from them all official 
communication on the subject until certain of its approval 
by a majority. 

Realizing, however, the uncertain issue of events, and, 
perhaps, doubting the confirmatory action of the Ameri- 
can Congress, Baez had shrewdly provided for the con- 
tingency of defeat, by requiring President Grant " to 
remit forthwith to the Dominican Government the sum 
of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in coin ; one 
hundred thousand dollars to be in cash, and fifty thousand 
in arms, for the purpose of aiding in defraying the tinavoid- 
able expenses of the State /" 

We have been careful to quote the very language of this 
precious document, lest the credulity of some of our readers 
might come short of a belief in its just interpretation. 

First, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in coin ; 
second, fifty thousand dollars of this sum to be converted 
into arms and delivered to the Dominican Government 
to aid in defraying its unavoidable expenses ! 

Had this latter Government, such as it was, become a 
speculator in arms, and were these arms to be sold at a 
profit to meet its pecuniary obligations, or were they to 
be used against the host of exiled patriots in case they 
should venture to return ?* 

A person unacquainted with the facts might reasonably 
conjecture that the moral views of our military secretary, 
upon the subject of legislation, would scarcely have been 
shared by his exalted principal, and that he, at least, 
would have declined to accept, without demurrer, the 
responsibihty of propping up and guarding an impotent 
tyranny. But the damaging evidence to the contrary is 
conclusive. 

And what shall be said of the meaner role of lobbyist 
in which he was irreverently cast, and which he unhesi- 
tatingl}^ assumed, in this Africo-American farce of " heads 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 188, 189. 



BABCOCK AND HIS "TANDEM." IO9 

I win, tails you lose," adapted to the American stage by 
those ingenious play-wrights Baez, Cazneau, Fabens and 
Company ! 

When this unworthy budget was unfolded to General 
Grant, only one of two courses were admissible to him. 
He was compelled either to accept or reject it. There 
was no middle ground whereon to stand. If rejected, 
there would have been an end to his plans of annexation ; 
but, if accepted, one advance step on the way to its accom- 
plishment would be gained. That he made free choice 
of the latter course, and bent all his energies to its general 
adoption, has been made manifest at the seat of govern- 
ment. 

On the eighteenth day of November, after an absence 
of some seventy days, General Babcock disembarked 
from the United States war steamer Albany, at the port 
of San Domingo, attended by Generals Ingalls and 
Sackett, — a triumvirate of the regular army, — one as 
negotiator in chief of the annexation treaty, another as 
interpreter, and the third as a sort of military reserve. 

The three were to have been specially commissioned, 
and honored with new titles, but it was found that this 
was not permissible, and so they were temporarily resolv- 
ed into a sort of tandem committee, with General Bab- 
cock on the lead and the Commissary of Subsistence in 
the rear.* 

Thus organized and empowered, it only remained to 
set up a dummy in the guise of a plenipotentiary, to bow 
his empty honors in and out of the Conference Chamber, 
and go through the manual operation of signing his name 
to the treaty. 

Such an one was found in the person of Major Ray- 
mond H. Perry, the two-days' successor of Consul Smith, 
who had been brushed away, through the recommenda- 
tion of " our special agent," as an obstacle in the way of 
annexation. f 

The orders received from the War Department by 

* Howard's Rep., p. 46. f Howard's Rep., pp. 21, 52, 103, 207. 



no THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

Generals Sackett and Ingalls required them to report to 
General Babcock at the City of New York before the ap- 
pointed day for the sailing of the steamer, and put them- 
selves under his further directions. 

General Babcock was instructed by Mr. Secretary Fish 
" to advise with Mr. Raymond H. Perry, tinofficially," as to 
the execution of the powers with which he (Perry) was 
intrusted, to " conclude a treaty and a convention with 
the Dominican Republic ;" and Mr. Perr}^ on the other 
hand, was directed, by the same official, to be governed by 
the advice of General Babcock ! And it was pursuant to 
these instructions that the treaty negotiations were con- 
ducted and concluded.* 

But that which might appear altogether inexplicable, 
had we not been previously prepared for it, was the per- 
sonal attendance of those two worthies, Fabens and 
Cazneau, at these international conferences. 

We have been made aware, however, of their constant 
zeal in behalf of annexation ; and the proprietary inter- 
ests which lay at the bottom of it, and whilst the one had 
brought himself into direct communication with the 
fuglemen of the White House, the other had been dis- 
patched there to make a tender to General Grant of the 
whole Dominican Republic, peoples, revolutions, public 
debt and all, provided, however, that all and singular the 
grants and franchises made and confirmed to Fabens, 
Cazneau and Company should be and remain forever in, 
violable ; among which was the one-fifth of all the public 
domain in a single batch. 

In the interim of General Babcock's absence from 
the island, Mr. Davis Hatch had been brought to trial 

* See Commission of Mr. Perry to make a treaty, Howard's Rep., p. 19 ; 
also, instructions of Secretary Fish to him, p. 192. Mr. Perry repeatedly 
says in his testimony, that his instructions were to follow the directions of 
General Babcock in negotiating the treaty, pp. 24, 25, 39. " I was present 
during all the conversations in relation to the treaty, but I had very little 
to say about the treaty itself," p. 25. " General Babcock conducted the 
negotiations ; he was the principal man," p. 25. " I signed the treaty oa 
the part of the United States," p. 28 ; see also p. 103. 



HATCH SENTENCED TO BE SHOT. Ill 

before a court-martial, composed of the willing tools of 
Baez, under charges of aiding and abetting the Cabral 
rebellion. 

The testimony, which was altogether ex-parte, merely 
showed that Mr. Hatch's house at Barahona had been 
overrun by the insurrectionary forces in possession of the 
place, and, in spite of his remonstrances, converted into 
a kind of military magazine ; but no voluntary act of his, 
inconsistent with neutrality, was made to appear. 

It is true that Juan Manuel Scroggins, whom we take 
to be a pure Castillian Yankee of African descent, de- 
posed "■ that he had seen that Mr. Hatch's house was some- 
times visited by the Commandant of Arms, and that 
Cabral himself dropped in there one day on his way to 
the encampment ;" but that, as he lived on the coast at a 
considerable distance from Barahona and occupied him- 
self with fishing, he could n't be expected to know much 
about it, although he had " been told" that "some ammuni- 
tions, merchandise, and a few straw hats" had been landed 
from the steamer Telegrafo and sent under a convoy to 
the interior.* 

It is also true that it was upon just such testimony as 
this that Mr. Hatch was convicted by his inquisitors, and 
sentenced to be shot — a spectacle so common to Do- 
minica, that it may be said to serve as a cheap substitute 
for the taurine pageants of the mother country ; and we 
confess to no little surprise that Baez should interrupt so 
interesting a ceremony, especially as it cost him nothing, 
for it should be borne in mind that the government was 
now being carried on through means furnished by General 
Grant ! 

But the programme which had been agreed upon and 
rehearsed at the capital was carefully followed out, and 
Mr. Hatch found himself relieved from the cruelty of an 
impending execution by the pardon of the magnanimous 
Baez, who imposed the trifling condition that its recipient 
should immediately, upon quitting his prison walls, de- 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 72, 73, 74, 



112 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

part the realm. And all this under the great seal of State, 
with its reverent motto, " God, Country and Liberty T God, 
whom they had forgotten as a nation and knew not ; Coun- 
try, which they had depopulated and impoverished ; Lib- 
erty, which they had destroyed.* What did it matter 
that all the citizens of Barahona, even to the government 
officials, comported themselves in the manner of Mr. 
Hatch? They were not upon trial, neither were they 
possessed of a coveted salt mine, wherein lay the real differ- 
ence, and hence his grave offence ! f 

Notwithstanding the pardon of Mr. Hatch, and his 
willingness to comply with its conditions, he was kept in 
close confinement at Azua for six months subsequent to 
its announcement.:}: This alone is sufficient to establish 
the deliberate intentions of his persecutors. 

Mr. Perry, our newly-appointed Commercial Agent, 
made repeated but unavaiUng efforts to obtain his release. 
Meanwhile the influence of General Babcock was used 
to secure his continued incarceration. The arguments 
which he had formerly addressed to Mr. Smith were used 
upon Mr. Perry, and we are glad to be able to say, with 
no better effect. 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 123, 125. 

I "You certainly would not go so far one side of your line of duty as to 
encourage Mr. Baez in persecuting me, were it not for the hope of some 
favor — some reward, directly or indirectly; and these reflections lead me 
to inquire what object you had in view of the questions you put to Mr. 
Smith in the month of August as to my character and standing, and as to 
the validity of the grants I have in the salt mine of Neyba. From whom 
did you hear of me and those grants, and what object had )'0u in inquiring 
whether they were valid or not?" — Letter of Davis Hatch to General Bab- 
cock. Howard's Rep., p. 124. 

:Baez " passed a decree annulling these grants, after having indirectly so- 
licited a sum of money for their ratification. — Ibid. 

The salt mine has been obtained quietly since the signing of the treaty, 
says Mr. Perry, p. 31. "I know the positive fact that he (Don Carlos Baez) 
brother of the President obtained it for O'Sullivan," p. 34. 

X Mr. Hatch was arrested at Barahona, August 28, 1869, and first taken to 
Azua, then to San Domingo City, then back to Azua, where he was tried 
the latter part of October, and sentenced November 2d, and immediately 
pardoned. After this he was kept in prison six months. 



CAZNEAU AND FABENS'S SPECULATIONS. II3 

Even before the departure of this latter gentleman from 
Washington, General Babcock was careful to apprise him 
of his personal convictions of the guilt of Mr. Hatch, 
and to admonish him to have nothing to do with his 
case.* 

He gave him letters of introduction to " his friends 
Cazneau, Fabens, and Spofford, Tileston & Co.," with 
whom he advised him to consult. 

Tt is not a little singular, too, that on his way out Mr. 
Perry accidentally (!) fell in with Mr. Fabens, as General 
Babcock had done before him, and who, to use his own 
words, " was full of his accounts of the rascality of a Mr. 
Hatch, and expressed a wish that I should not re- 
lease him on my arrival at San Domingo, as he was 
an enemy to Baez and annexation, also to himself and 
Cazneau." 

Cazneau and Fabens were partners in a stupendous 
land grant, conveying one-fifth of all the public lands in 
Dominica, as also in some other schemes, no less pros- 
pectively profitable.f We find the two constantly ad- 
mitted to the treaty convention, and it was there that 
Cazneau made the infamous proposition to '* draw up two 
separate" treaty stipulations — one to lay before the peo- 
ple of San Domingo, to hasten and control the election, 
and the other for the United States government ! :{: And 
afterwards, too, when Mr. Perry made an earnest appeal 
to Baez for the release of Mr. Hatch, this same Cazneau 
vehemently opposed it, and to the credit of Mr. Perry, 
be it said, that he then and there applied to him some 
terms which should not be omitted from his biography.§ 
But when General Babcock was informed by letter of 

* " I always told him (Cazneau) I did not want to have anything to do with 

the Hatch case, because I thought Mr. Hatch guilty And before Mr. 

Perry went away, I told him these things." — Howard's Rep. Testimony of 
Babcock, p. 42. 

f Howard's Rep., 178-9. 

X Howard's Rep., pp. 103 (Perry), no (Babcock). 

§ " I told him he was a trickster and a dishonest man." — Howard's Rep., 
p. 105 (Perry). 



114 ^^'^ SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

this quarrel, he wrote to Mr. Perry, expressing his regret 
at its occurrence.* 

It is humiliating, it is even pitiful tq observe the feeble 
excuses M^ith which " our special agent" has been willing 
to cloak his moral weakness. Upon landing from the 
Albany, he had relieved President Baez from the virtual 
command of our war ships, as Mr. Perry had reheved Mr. 
Smith. The power to enforce ]\xst\cc was in his hands. A 
word, a finger-poise would have been sufficient, if not the 
pointing of a gun ! But that word, even, was wanting ! 
All his patriotism was absorbed in speculation ; the spirit 
had died out ! 

He confesses to having read a letter from Mr. Hatch 
addressed to Mr. Perry in his official capacity, in which 
the circumstances of his (Hatch's) illegal detention were 
narrated, but almost in the same breath he tells us, that 
he " never saw the record," and had no evidence what- 
ever of the real facts of the case. What little he did 
know was thrust upon him. He certainly used no effort 
to obtain information. When questioned upon these 
points before the Senate Committee, he coolly says that 
he made no inquiries at any government office about the 
condition of Mr. Hatch ; never mentioned his name to 
others in a manner to excite any interest in his fate, nor 
used his offices in any way to obtain his release. 

It was the same with Generals Sackett and Ingalls ; but 
as they took their cue from General Babcock, by order 
of His Excellency the President, we do not see that they 
can be held accountable for any lack of humanity .f And 

* See letter of Cazneau to Babcock, p. 135 ; also, Babcock to Perry, 108 ; 
also, Perry to Babcock, 109. 

f Howard's Rep., pp. 43, 44, 45. Evidence of Sackett, p. 46 ; also. Evi- 
dence of Ingalls, p. 55. 

Question by Senator Ferry to General Babcock : "Did you not have con- 
trol of all the United States ships of war that were there ?" A. " I had con- 
trol the second time I was there." 

Question by Senator Vickcrs : " Did I understand you to say that Mr- 
Perry showed you a letter from Mr. Hatch complaining that he was in pris 
on?" A. " lie did." 



hatch's jailer discovered. 115 

when, after repeated importunities and rebuffs, Mr. Perry, 
in a despairing spirit, asked General Babcock the very 
day before he left, why it was that he could not obtain 
the release of Mr. Hatch, he was answered, " that he had 
better not apply for his release," at any rate, not until he 
"had left the island," "that Hatch would work against 
the treaty and was an enemy to that party!' 

Finally, after six months' of illegal detention, Mr. 
Hatch was liberated, but not until General Babcock had 
withdrawn himself from the island and Admiral Poor 
was left free to second the peremptory demand of Mr. 
Perry.* 

The next interview between Mr. Perry and General 
Babcock was in Washington, and it is there that the latter 
gentleman, quite indiscreetly for a politician, discloses to 
us the real jailer of Mr. Hatch. 

" I met General Babcock," says Mr. Perry, " on the 
morning of the floral gathering at Arlington, on Deco- 
ration Day. We were speaking about one matter or 
another ; about San Domingo ; and he said that it was a 
great pity that I had had that man Hatch released. I 
told him that I had direct orders from the State Depart- 
ment to secure his release. Then he said I could not help 
it, having received those orders ; but it was a mistake, 
and that the President was very much displeased about it." 

* Howard's Rep., p. 21, 26. 

Q. " Did you read the letter ?" A. " I did."— Ibid, p. 45. 

Question by Mr. Scliurz : " Were you aware at that time that Mr. Hatch 
had passed through his trial, that he had been sentenced to death, and that 
the sentence had been commuted to banishment ?" A. " Only from general 
report. / had no record ; nothing had been furnished me. I understood 
that to be the case, however." 

Q. " Did you know that he was still held in prison ?" A. " I understood 
that he was still held in prison ; that the pardon had not yet been given to 
him." 

Q. " Did }'0U take any steps, or did you inquire at any government office 
about the condition or situation in which Mr. Hatch then was ?" A. " I did 
not." — Ibid, p. 44. 

Question by Mr. Vickers : " Did you use your offices in any way to obtain 
the release of Mr. Hatch?" A. '' I did not. — Ibid, p. 43." 



Il6 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

We forbear comment, or to make any dilution of facts 
so infamously damaging-. 

The treaty convention consumed a matter of ten days. 
" Everything had been settled ; there was nothing more 
to be done except the mere signing," says General Bab- 
cock, and yet the signing hung fire on the sixth article. 
Baez wanted some preliminary legislation by his Sena- 
tors, in the matter of grants of lands to individuals, which 
that article prohibited. But General Babcock is too 
modest to give full effect to the melodramatic scene 
which ensued, hence we pass to the completer version of 
General Sackett, who says, "just as the sixth article — I 
think that is the number of it, at all events one of the last 
articles, which in a few words stated that there should be 
no more grants or concessions made after the signing of 
the treaty — was reached, they objected to it for a long 
time — I do not know but a part of two days — and Gen- 
eral Babcock got very much annoyed at it, and said to 
me, ' There appears to be something wrong here.* The 
conversation ceased, and he got up and passed off to a 
window and was looking out of the window when Presi- 
dent Baez turned around to me and said : ' I will tell you 
what we want : General Babcock was very kind to us 
last summer; he sent Captain Queen with the Tuscarora 
to seize the Telegrafo and run her into a place where she 
was tied up by the English, and then also Mr. Smith had 
been very obnoxious to us, and we made certain represen- 
tations to General Babcock, and he investigated them and 
laid them before the President, and Mr. Smith was dis- 
missed, and Mr. Perry sent down in his place, and for 
these things, showing great kindness on the part of Gen- 
eral Babcock, we should like to make him a grant of land 
in Samana.""' The holy horror with which General Bab- 
cock received this proposition, can never be accurately 
rendered in simple narrative ; his upraised hands, his en- 
ergetic ejaculation and outburst of sentiment are suited 
to the higher school of the imitative art ! 
* Howard's Rep., pp. 43, 49. 



D0MT7JICAN VOTE ON ANNEXATION. H/ 

During the treaty negotiations, unusual quietude had 
pervaded San ])omingo City, superinduced, doubtless, 
by the " moral support " of the fifty thousand dollars' worth 
of arms delivered by General Babcock and the suggest- 
ive broadsides of the Albany ! 

The treaty having been signed, it only remained to 
arrive at the sentiments of the people ; and, for this 
object, after long preparations and delays, the vote was 
proceeded with. But how? Under military supervision, 
and the admonishing cruelties of the government to- 
wards those who ventured upon opposition ; banishment, 
\n some instances, and imprisonment, if not death, in 
others. 

We have the evidence of Mr. Perry, who was on the 
^pot, that the first man who had the temerity to record 
nis negative vote, was immediately arrested and sent to 
Azua under a military guard ; that, during the voting, 
there were a great many arrested in that city, some of 
whom were banished and others imprisoned, because of 
their opposition to the treaty. 

" No opposition was permitted," says Mr. Perry, yet, 
during the taking of the vote, there were " two or three 
attempts at revolution, at night, in San Domingo City, 
Porto Plata and other points." 

In order, however, to demonstrate that there had been 
a free election, a few votes were recorded in the negative 
by the real friends of the measure.* 

In the meantime, the Telegrafo, " that dreadful scourge 
of the oceati^'' now altogether discharged of her armament, 
was kept at bay, and the landing of exiled patriots (set 
down in the protocol under the head of " foreign aggres- 
sion or machination") effectually guarded against by a 
naval cordon, embellished with the proud ensign of 

" The land of the free and the home of the brave. " 

From his head-quarters on board the Albany, General 
Babcock directed the movements of the fleet ; not only 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 27, 28, 64. 



Il8 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOij. 

the Dominican coast, 'but the whole Island was subjected 
to espionage. The orders are positive in these regards ; 
and, when subsequently there were signs of a revolution- 
ary movement at Porto Plata, Captain Bunce was de- 
spatched there in command of the Nantasket, and threat- 
ened to fire on the town in case of an outbreak ! There 
had, indeed, been some disturbance, and many arrests 
were made; but all who were engaged in it were Do- 
minicans, and some were officers in the Dominican 
army.* 

The subjoined orders of General Babcock, which we 
give in detail, sufficiently explain themselves : 

" United States Steamer Albany, 

" Off San Domingo, December 3, 1869. 

" Captain : — I have the honor to inform you, that, in 
accordance with instructions from the President of the 
United States, I have concluded negotiations with the 
Dominican Republic for the lease of the bay and penin- 
sular of Samana and other purposes. 

"■ In this negotiation, the President has guaranteed to the 
Dominican Repubhc protection from all foreign interpo- 
sition during the time specified in the treaties for submit- 
ting the same to the people of the Dominican Republic. 
For this purpose, the Hon. Secretary of the Navy was directed 
to place three armed vessels in this harbor, subject to my in- 
structions ; two of these vessels to remain in the waters 
of the Republic of San Domingo, the third to return to 
the United States with me. But two of the vessels have 
arrived — the Albany and your own. As it is possible 
that the third vessel may have been ordered to the bay 
of Samana, I shall proceed there to-morrow to ascertain, 
and, at the same time, to take possession of the bay and 
peninsula in the name of the United States. I shall raise 
the United States flag on shore, and shall leave a small 
guard with it. Should another vessel arrive here, will 
you please to show the commanding officer this letter, 
aud request him to go at once to the bay of Samana and 
report to me. In case I am not there with the Albany, I 
will leave with the guard there a letter of instructions. 

" You will please make the south side of this island 
your cruising ground, making this place your head- 

* Howard's Rep. p 200. 



babcock's orders to the fleet. iig 

quarters. You will please extend to President Baez and 
his officers here such courtesies as you may think best. 
Should you find any foreign intervention intended, you 
will use all your force to carry out, to the letter, the 
guarantees given in the treaties. 

" The Dominican Republic fear trouble from the 
Haytian border about Jacmel. You will please inform 
the people, in case you are satisfied there is an intended 
intervention, that such intervention, direct or indirect, 
wt/l be regarded as an unfriendly act totvards the United 
States, and take such steps as you think necessary. 

" I have requested President Baez to notify you through 
our Commercial Agent, Mr. R. H. Perry, if he has any 
information of service to you. Will you please coimnmiicate 
often with the authorities here, and forward, from time to 
time to Washington, all information you may think useful 
to your Government? 

" I suppose that it is the intention of the Navy Depart- 
ment to place the two vessels here under the admiral 
commanding the Gulf squadron. 

" In the execution of this duty, you will have to act 
upon your own judgment, as it is impossible to anticipate 
all the circumstances which may arise. You will please 
regard this communication as confidential, except the 
part relating to the lease of the bay and peninsula of 
Samana. 

** You will use steam in all cases when needed. I will 
request the Navy Department to provide you a supply at 
an early day." 

Having arrived at Samana on board the Albany, and 
finding that no other war ship had made that harbor, 
General Babcock left there a copy of the foregoing letter, 
together with the following written orders, to be delivered 
to the commander of any United States vessel that might 
come in : 

"United States Steamer Albany, 

" Bay of Samana, December 7, 1869. 

" Sir : — The inclosed letter of instructions will serve to 
guide you, if assigned to the duty referred to. Will you 
please to make the north side of the island your cruismg- 
ground, making Porto Plata your head -quarters? The 
remark made in the letter to Captain Bunce about the 



120 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

Haytian border at Jacmel, applies equally to the Haytian 
border at Cape Hayti. Will you please to visit that 
place, and give the authorities there the same information, 
about any intervention, if you think there is an intended 
intervention from that place ? You will have to use your 
own judgment in the execution of this duty. I know 
that it is the wish of the President to give them full 
protection against foreign intervention."* .... 

In appending his signature to the foregoing orders, 
General Babcock contented himself with the simple addi- 
tion of " secretary ;" but, whether to Baez or to General 
Grant, he does not inform us. Inasmuch, however, as 
the particular services to which these orders relate, were 
rendered for the Dominican Government, and at the 
expense of the United States, it is presumed that, like 
the boy in the show, having paid our money, we can take 
our choice. 

Formal possession having been taken of Samana, the 
person chosen by General Babcock to represent our 
Government there, and have the custody of its flag, 
moneys and properties, was Fabens, the friend and part- 
ner of Cazneau. 

Meanwhile Mr. Perry remained at his station in San 
Domingo City, more in the character of an observer than 
an active participant in the scenes which most nearly 
affected the two Governments. He had been instructed 
to govern his actions by the advice of General Babcock 
and that gentleman had advised him to use his endeavor^ 
on the side of annexation, and always to " speak encour- 
agingly" of it in his communications to the Home Gov 
ernment. 

General Ingalls followed in the same key, and with 
equal emphasis.f 

* Howard's Rep. p. 164. 
f Jn a letter from General Ingalls to Mr. Perry, dated March 31, 1870, the 
follcwing passages occur : " The Senate has been debating the treaty pretty 
sharp]}', but it will be confirmed shortly. The treaty will be ratified. .... 
Be careful to cultivate the idea of final annexation. Do not write, speak 
or think otherwise." 



PRESIDENT GRANT TAKES THE FIELD. 121 

It is not to be wondered at, that, with these instruc- 
tions before his eyes and the collateral influences brought 
to bear upon him, Mr. Perry should have so far yielded 
to his official counsellors as to give a tinge of false color- 
ing to some of his dispatches during the voting period. 

Young, and without experience in his new capacity, he 
had been sent to San Domingo in an emergency, with no 
definite idea of what was expected of him. Positively 
no instructions concerning his mission had been given 
him ; but he was acute, energetic and determined in 
what he conceived to be his duty. Finding himself 
hampered and opposed in its discharge by those to whose 
support he felt himself entitled, he suddenly awoke to a 
realization of the distasteful attitude which he had been 
induced to assume ; and, naturally enough, for one of 
his temperament, as suddenly reacted upon his hypocrit- 
ical advisers with less of dignity than justice. 

But it does not appear to us that the worst of his faults 
justified the Senate Committee, before whom he was 
summoned as a witness, in trying him as a criminal. Nor 
is the conclusion arrived at by a majority of that Com- 
mittee, such as we had reason to expect from the judg- 
ment of unbiased minds. 

In due time and order, the official footings of the Do- 
minican vote, pro and con the absorption of that country 
by the United States, were transmitted to General Grant, 
and thereupon the work of preparing the way for the 
favorable reception and ratification of the treaty of an- 
nexation by the Senate was begun in earnest. 

It is unnecessary to go into the details of these party 
manoeuvers. 

Now it was that the President of the United States 
took on the part which had been specially set down to 
him in this business, and faithfully and well he performed 
its meaner offices. Not only was his entire " military 
staff" enlisted in the work, but the President, in person, 
was early in the field directing their movements. 

For the hesitating, half-decided senators, there was no 



122 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

lack of coaxing flatteries, and the surer bait of executive 
favor; but towards such as rejected any compromise of 
their principles, and refused to be directed under the 
whip and spur of party riders, no mercy was shown. 

A notable instance of the rule-or-ruin policy of the 
President, is to be found in his treatment of Senator 
Sumner, who was removed from the chairmanship of the 
Committee on Foreign Relations solely on account of his 
opposition to the policy of the Administration regarding 
the annexation of the Dominican Republic to the Unit- 
ed States, and the extraordinary means employed to 
3ffect it ! 

Enough. The measure failed, as it ought to have 
failed, and we do not propose to follow the Senatorial 
cortege that held an inquest over its remains in San Do- 
mingo. 

Nevertheless, we feel that our readers would not will- 
ingly allow us to take our leave of the subject so long as 
it lay clearly within our reach to settle the question of 
General Grant's complicity with the projectors and man- 
agers of this unfortunate enterprise, and to this object we 
devote a few extracts from the testimon}?^ of witnesses 
called before the Senate Committee of investigation. 

It will not be disputed that the intimate and confiden- 
tial relations which then and theretofore existed between 
the President and his Special Agent to San Domingo, 
and which have thus far undergone no change, in them- 
selves raise a strong presumption, that all the details of 
information acquired by the one were communicated 
without hesitation or reserve to the other. 

For example, let us take the case of Davis Hatch, who 
was illegally imprisoned, beyond all controversy, for half 
a year at Azua. Mr. Perry informs us that the admitted 
cause of his imprisonment grew out of his opposition to 
annexation, and the fear of his influence upon the Ameri- 
can mind through the New York papers, with which he 
was known to correspond. 

But General Babcock denies all knowledge of these 



' CAZNEAU'S LETTER. 123 

alleged motives of detention, and is always quite ready 
to assert his belief in the guilt of Mr. Hlatch upon other 
and more serious grounds. He had so expressed him- 
self to the President on more than one occasion.* He 
admits that he was in the frequent habit of receiving let- 
ters from " his friend" Cazneau, and that he showed all 
these letters to General Grant.f 

Now let us see what kind of letters Cazneau wrote. In 
a communication to General Babcock, dated at San Do- 
mingo, February 19, 1870, nearly three months before 
the release of Mr. Hatch, he says : 

" As you must have observed before you left. Perry 
cannot discriminate between those minor matters which 
will bear postponement and the higher necessities which 
cannot wait. His ruling idea now is, to obtain the libera- 
tion of Mr. Davis Hatch, convicted and notoriously 
guilty of complicity with Cabral and the Cacos of Hayti 
in their attempted overthrow of Baez. Hatch is knozvn to 
correspond with the New York Times and other papers op- 
posed to annexation, and this government is resolved to keep 
him within safe limits until the cause shall be placed beyond 

the reach of such attacks President Baez said to him 

in my presence, that Hatch was indulging in threats 
against this government, and would certainly make use 

of his liberty to join the enemies of annexation That 

a few weeks' restraint would not be so inconvenient to 
him as his slanderous statements might become to the suc- 
cess of Ge?ieral Granf s policy in the Antilles.":}: 

We are forced to concede, after reading the foregoing 
letter, which was received by General Babcock and pro- 
duced at the investigation, that he was not left in igno- 
rance, or even doubt, as to the real cause of the detention 
of Mr. Hatch, and as he has testified that he showed this 
letter to the President, the proof is made to cover both 
propositions. 

It is possible that all may not be able to see it in this 
light, owing to the prevailing malady of party blindness, 
but fortunately for such the committee have themselves 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 118, 134. f Howard's Rep., p. 116. 

X Howard's Rep., p. 135. 



124 "^^^ SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

furnished a most excellent pair of spectacles. We quote 
from their report of the examination of General Babcock. 
Mr. Schurz put this question to him : " Does President 
Grant generally carry on his correspondence directly, or 
through his secretaries?" But thereupon, Mr. Howard, 
who was ever on the alert, interposed with the remark, 
" I do not see what that has to do with the inquiry." Mr. 
Schurz explained : " The assertion is made that Cazneau 
was in correspondence with President Grant. General 
Babcock admits that he received frequent letters from 
Cazneau, and admits also, that he replied, dating his let- 
ters at the Executive Mansion, and he also says that he 
submitted the letters of General Cazneau to President 
Grant. Now the question is legitimate, whether Presi- 
dent Grant is in the habit of carrying on his correspon- 
dence personally, or through his secretaries. To this Mr. 
Howard replied by an appeal to the chairman, in the fol- 
lowing significant words : ' I take it, Mr. Chairman, that 
we are not to go into inquiries as to the President.' " * 

We find a later letter to General Babcock from Mr. 
Perry. It is dated at San Domingo City, April 15, and 
contains the following passage, " As an instance of the 
character of Cazneau and his readiness to sacrifice any 
one and anything for the furtherance of his own plans and 
welfare, let me tell you that he vigorously opposed the 
release of Hatch, and as vigorously pleaded for the 
release of the two Dominicans guilty of murder, who 
chanced to serve some of his interests if freed." f 

That Mr. Perry thoroughly understood this whole sub- 
ject, there can be no question. His information was de- 
rived from both private and official sources. In a com 
munication addressed to him by M. M. Gautier, Ministei 
of Foreign Affairs under Baez, we find the following state- 
ment: 

" The repeated and urgent solicitations which you have 
made in favor of the said Hatch, united with the desire 
which my government has to please that of Washington. 

* Howard's Rep., p. 16. f Howard's Rep., p. loq 



hatch's release ordered. 125 

would have persuaded us to concede his passports at 
once, had it not been for the irreconcilable enmity with 
which he attacks the government in all of its acts through 
the newspapers and their agents, inventing calumnies to 
divert the public mind against annexation to the United 

States." 

'' I desire that you will be good enough to assure his 
Excellency, the Secretary of State in Washington, that 
the prolonged sojourn of Mr. Hatch here has been only 
to prevent his hostile action in New York, assuring him 
at the same time that if this reason will not satisfy him, 
and that should he insist on his (Hatch's) being permitted 
to go, the government, which has had no other aim than 
that of preventing falsehood and the misleading of public 
opinion in the United States, will be very glad to satisfy 
his wishes." * 

A copy of this correspondence, wherein it will be ob- 
served the wil}^ minister completely shifted the responsi- 
bility of the further incarceration of Mr. Hatch upon the 
Washington officials, was immediately transmitted to the 
State Department by Mr. Perry, and thereupon, in the 
absence of Mr. Secretary Fish, and fortunately for Mr. 
Hatch, without consulting the President, the Assistant 
Secretary of State instructed Mr. Perry in a manner so 
decided that this continued persecution presented any- 
thing but a healthy aspect, and so, the peremptory de- 
mand of Mr. Perry, supported by some timely sugges- 
tions from Admiral Poor of the United States flag ship 
Severn, was reluctantly conceded. The Admiral has told 
us that in his interview with Baez, "' the explanation for the 
continued incarceration of Mr. Hatch was his connection 
with parties and presses in the United States hostile to 
San Domingo, and that he would exert an influence there 
upon public opinion that would be very detrimental to 
the interests of San Domingo with regard to annexation." 

And when after a malicious arrest, a sham trial, a false 
conviction, a pardon and a sentence of banishment all in 
one, and weary months of imprisonment added to these, 
lor no other declared reason than the unfavorable opin- 

* Howard's Rep., p. 11. 



126 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

ions which he was supposed to hold regarding the annex 
ation policy of President Grant, and the dread of theii 
promulgation through the medium of the New York 
press, our persecuted fellow-countryman was permitted to 
find his way to the land of his birth. We are told by one 
who could not help but know, that the order for his re- 
lease was issued without the knowledge of the President, 
and that he was very much displeased about it."* 

An array of facts like these would seem to preclude the 
possibility of a lower descent in the scale of political char- 
latanism, but in what terms shall they be characterized, 
when it is considered that Mr. Hatch was really in favor 
of annexation ;f that the crimes of which he was accused, 
as well as the wretched excuses for his detention as a 
prisoner, after pardon, were only a false covering and a 
pretence wherewithal to conceal the basest motives. The 
Commission of Enquiry have reported that the coal de- 
posits of San Domingo, of which we had had such glowing 
accounts, are nowhere to be found, that the mines of 
precious ores are a myth ; but there is no disputing the 
treasures of Neyba, whose crystals of salt rise into a 
mountain, and may be quarried in huge masses like stone. 

With Mr. Hatch's grant of these mines annulled, his 
property confiscated, there would have been found some 
familiar names among his successors, and with annexation 
an accomplished fact, who could estimate the value of 
their franchise ?:}: 

* Howard's Rep., pp. 25, 44, 118. 

f We quote from a letter of Mr. Hatch to Senator Ferry, dated May 13, 
1870: "I have seen no reason to change my views upon the subject of an- 
nexation as expressed in my letter of the 3d of March on the political state 
of the country 

" I advocated it through him (Baez) for more than a year after he cama 
into power this last time, and till after there was a large force organized 
against him, determined that he should not have the honor and emolument? 
too, after being so long the bitter enemy of the government and people of 
the United States." 

X Here is an extract from a letter to Mr. Hatch as early as February, 1866. 
It is from Mr. Edmund Graun, who had previous to its date been assured 
by Baez of his good intention towards Mr. Hatch : 



THE DOMINICANS WOULD PREFER INDEPENDENCE. 127 

An inquiry, at this time, into the policy or impolicy of 
annexation, even though it were to be conceded as ap- 
proved by the Dominican public, would cover, by far, 
too much ground to be admitted to these pages. We 
may, however, be indulged in the single remark, that the 
representations, official and unofficial, which have, from 
time to time, been made to this Government regarding 
the unanimity of sentiment in the Island Republic upon 
the annexation question, have been contradicted in a 
manifesto signed by many leading citizens, and forwarded 
to the State Department.* 

If we were called upon to state the average voice of 
this people, as expressed in districts, which have been 
reported as favoring annexation, it would stand like this : 
they would prefer to be independent ; but the intermin- 
able wars which infest the country render this impossi- 
ble, so they are willing to accept annexation, without 
resistance, as a means of avoiding military service, and 
securing to themselves a life of careless indolence. 

The following extracts, from the report of the " Com- 

" Upon my second visit to this city, in the early part of January, I was 
surprised to find Mr. Baez had entirely changed in regard to the interest 
he had previously manifested in your favor, mentioning one objection after 
another, pretending all the time to be interested in having the enterprise 
carried through, and yet showing by the imaginary difficulties and objec- 
tions brought forward, increasing animosity to it, conveying the impression 
that he expected a consideration for his services in the business ; if not, he 
was prepared to defeat it. 

" On my last interview with Mr. Baez, on the 2d of February, upon some 
remark being made by you that the titles were sacred, and you would not 
renounce them, Mr. Baez became very angry and excited and said ' he 
neither feared nor cared for the United States government.' " 

* See letter of General Cabral to U. S. Commissioners, and contained jn 
their Report, pp. 54, 55, wherein he says, that the representations which 
Baez has made are wanting in truth, " and the means that have been used 
to make the Cabinet at Washington believe that annexation is acceptable 
to the Dominicans, has been the result of the arbitrary conduct, the tyranny 
and terrorism which he has exercised over the inhabitants of the country, 
by imprisoning, expelling from the country, shooting all those who have 
heretofore spoken out, or that now speak out against the idea of annexing 
our Republic." 



128 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

mission of Enquiry" and their assistants, may not be 
without interest to our readers : 

" The frequency of civil commotions, during a long- 
period, and the consequent insecurity of property, have 
paralyzed industry, discouraged accumulation, and so 
impoverished the country, that, for the last two )^ears, 
the financial resources of the Government, as its officers 
informed us, have been inadequate to pay its expenses. 
Meanwhile, it has been constantly harassed with incur- 
sions and attempts at revolutions."* * * * * 

" To such an extent has this been carried, that certain 
capitalists there invest in prominent revolutionists as a 
matter of business. Revolution becomes there a branch 
of trade, in which capitalists embark with certainty of 
great risks, but with possibility of great gains."t * * * 

** The population is generally of mixed blood. The 
great majority, especially along the coast, are neither 
pure black nor pure white — they are mixed in every 
conceivable degree.":}: * * * * 

"Among the popular vices is that of petty gambling, 
which is indulged in openly and extensively, especially 
by the Spanish portion of the population. "§ * * * * 

" There are few schools in the Republic, and, conse- 
quently, the great majority of the people are uneducat- 
ed."! * * * H'- 

** The question was frequently asked, in case the inde- 
pendence of the Dominican Republic were possible — 
Would you prefer it to annexation? The general answer 
was — ' We would prefer independence, but independence 
is impossible." ^ * * * * 

" We questioned one man, who seemed to be the most 
intelligent among them (the domesticated wild -hog 
dealers in Savana del Valle), and found that their only 
idea of, or care for annexation, is, that it will keep them 
out of the army, and leave them to the enjoyment of 
their own chosen mode of life."** * * * * 

" They generally express themselves in favor of annexa- 

* Com. Rep., pp. 7, 8. f lb., p. 9. X lb., p. 13. § lb., p. 13. 
j lb., p. 14. 1 lb. p. 32. ** lb., p. 77. 



GENERAL INGALLS' TESTIMONY. 1 29 

tion (in the region of Samana), as they have been dis- 
turbed so much by internal wars."* 

" They were, of course, tired of war, and prepared to 
receive protection and annexation without protest" (in 
the region of Azua.)f * * * * 

" Its only object to them is relief from internal wars.":): 

That it was never believed, on the part of the Govern- 
ment officials at Washington, that a peaceable possession 
and occupancy of the Dominican Territory would be 
possible, in view of the sectional disturbances and revo- 
lutions then in progress there, and the open hostility of 
some of the larger towns to annexation, is made apparent 
by what General Ingalls, a Commissary of Subsistence, 
U. S. A., has said of his special mission to that country : 

" I wanted," says this General, " to get all the informa- 
tion I could, as, in case, the island should be annexed, it 
would be my duty, probably, to have a good deal to do 
with it officially in the way of sending supplies there."§ 

The deliberate purpose of the government was suffi- 
ciently evidenced by the ample fleet which hung omi- 
nously about the island, — not only during the voting 
period, when General Grant was carrying on a branch 
government in San Domingo, at the expense of the secret 
service fund, with General Babcock as prime minister, 
but for two whole years ! 

It was only the other day that we had the footings of 
the little bill of costs, which attended this branch of the 
business, in a special report to Congress, from the Secre- 
tary of War, in answer to a resolution of that body, 
from which it appears that there were ten United States 
ships of war employed in this service at an expenditure 
of $490,630. 

And, now, in taking leave of a subject which has so 
agitated the public mind, it is not too much to say that 

* lb., p. 84. f lb., p. iS)S. X lb., p. 106. 

§ Howard's Rep., p. 57. 



130 THE SANTO DOMINGO JOB. 

the evidence establishes the fact, that the two master 
spirits of this whole scheme of annexation, in all its dis- 
gusting details, from the first secret mission of Fabens to 
the Executive Mansion, to the last move of the black and 
white men upon the political chess-board, were the two 
Presidents of the two Republics — San Domingo and the 
United States ! 



CHAPTER X. 

The Gold Conspiracy. — Black Friday. — Who were the wire-pullers. — 
Brother-in-law Corbin. — Amount of profits his wife realized. — The Presi- 
dent's complicity in the matter, 

" The great Black-Friday Gold-Conspiracy" was, with- 
out exception, the most gigantic and debasing scheme of 
financial plunder and ruin of which we have any account. 

The immense drain upon the resources of the country, 
occasioned by our prolonged civil war, had had the in- 
evitable effect to depress the national credit and greatly 
reduce the current value of its paper currency. 

Gold, which, when it maintains its true relation to 
commerce, is the legitimate measure of all values, being, 
in itself, unchangeable, became, through an erroneous 
system of rating, a mere marketable commodity, whose 
fluctuations upon 'Change were an object of speculation. 
For example, in lieu of rating " greenbacks" at a discount 
below the uniform standard which gold is alone able to 
furnish, the order was reversed, and " greenbacks" be- 
came the standard by which the daily pulsations of the 
gold-market were timed and counted. 

It is easy to understand how a heavy day at the Custom 
House, or any unusual demand for foreign exchange, 
would have the effect to send gold up at the Exhange. 

In order to provide against so common and unneces- 
sary a contingency, it was the custom of the Treasury 
Department to precipitate upon the gold-market large 
amounts of specie. These sales which were usually made 
by order of the President being discreetly timed, opera- 
ted to prevent a sudden rise in the price of gold. 

Besides the merchants and importers of foreign goods 
in the larger cities, who required the use of large amounts 
of specie for the transaction of their regular business, 
there was a large class of speculators who bought and 

(13O 



132 BUTTERFIELD AND CORBIN. 

sold gold in the exchange-rooms without really handling 
the metal or requiring it for purposes of trade ; so that, 
at the best, operations in gold were rendered precarious. 

Among the boldest speculators in this line were the 
notorious Jay Gould and James Fisk, jr. They well un- 
derstood the mysterious ways of the gold -room, and 
could lay a plot and " make a corner" with the expert- 
ness of pick-pockets. 

It was these accomplished gentlemen who prepared the 
way and furnished the instruments of the gold conspiracy. 
In order to its successful accomplishment, it was neces- 
sary to secure two things beforehand : First, the co-ope- 
ration (wittingly or unwittingly) of the President of the 
United States ; second, the incommunicative inaction 
of General Butterfield, the Assistant Treasurer in charge 
of the United States Sub-Treasury at New York, whose 
untimely appeals to the Treasurer at Washington in the 
interest of commerce, if not prevented, might have a 
tendency to bring on a premature crisis, for it would 
never do for the Government to open its money-vaults 
to the suffering brokers of Wall Street before the finan- 
cial fever had run its course ! 

In order, therefore, to make all sure, a stock of family 
influence was laid in, by attaching to the interests of Fisk 
and Gould, the services of Mr. Abel R. Corbin, the 
brother-in-law of the President, and a personal friend of 
General Butterfield, whose appointment as Assistant 
Treasurer, Corbin had helped to secure. 

It should be mentioned in this connection that the two 
persons most active in the " gift enterprise," of providing 
General Grant with his Washington house, were Corbin 
and Butterfield, and Corbin was himself the owner of the 
house which it was proposed to buy with the subscrip- 
tion money.* 

*See particulars of General Butterficld's appointment as Assistant 
Treasurer and his subsequent resignation to avoid the scrutiny of an In- 
vestigating Committee. 



FISK AND GOULD. 1 33 

Fisk and Gould, at this time, were the principal man- 
agers of the two magnificent steamers of the Newport 
line, upon which the President was occasionally induced 
to accept the compliment of a free passage. He was, 
indeed, upon terms of social intimacy with both Fisk and 
Gould. 

It was upon one of these steamers that the practice of 
selling gold by the Treasury Department was first talked 
over between the President and Mr. Gould, who ex- 
pressed himself as opposed to it, on account of its ten- 
dency to cheapen such of the farm products of the 
West as naturally seek an Eastern market, and the Presi- 
dent was persuaded to take the same view of it. 

This apparently accidental meeting was followed up 
by other interviews, arranged for the same parties, at the 
dwelling-house of Corbin in the City of New York, 
which resulted in finally obtaining the assurance of the 
President that he would prohibit, for the time being, the 
further sales of gold. 

Everything being now arranged to the satisfaction of 
the conspirators, the manipulation of gold in the Gold- 
room and upon the street was begun in real earnest. As 
a preliminary step, Corbin purchased of Jay Gould for 
his (Corbin's) wife, the President's sister, gold to the 
amount of one and a-half million dollars ! upon which a 
very great profit was realized. 

It is unnecessary for us to recount the scenes in Wall 
Street of those three terrible days, which culminated in 
the financial disasters oi Black Friday, 

The President, pursuant to his promise, had instructed 
the Treasury Department to desist from making any fur- 
ther sales of gold — the price of which, by means of the 
impetus which had been given to the market by the con- 
certed operations of the conspirators and their abettors, 
advanced beyond all calculation, and millions were made 
and lost at the fall of the hammer. 

The streets in the vicinity of the Gold-room were 
filled with excited men. The Gold -room itself was a 



134 THE PRESIDENT'S COMPLICITY. 

pandemonium, and old houses, whose credit had never 
been shaken, were overwhelmed in the general crash. 

The conspirators were jubilant, rich, and universally 
execrated. 

Thus ended the drama of " Black Friday" in all but 
the division of the spoils. Twenty-five thousand dollars 
of these spoils were traced by the Congressional Com- 
mittee of investigation directly into the hands of the 
wife of the President of the United States ! When, at 
the instance of the Committee, its Chairman waited upon 
the President to know if he desired to make any explana- 
tion in reference to this and other points of the testimony 
of a suspicious character, he signified his wish to remain 
silent.* 

* Those parts of the testimony taken by the Congressional Committee to 
investigate the Gold Conspiracy, which reflected most severely upon the 
President and the members of his family, were suppressed. The following 
is significant, in view of facts which have been well established : 

" Tuesday, Feb. i, 1870. — Mr. Cox then oifered the following resolution : 
'That the Chairman of this Committee be requested, either in writing or 
personally, as he may choose, to confer with the President of the United 
States in reference to the testimony given before the Committee which 
refers to him or his family, and that in said conference he respectfullj' re- 
quest of the President, after considering the matter, whether he desires to 
be heard before the Committee or otherwise with reference to said evidence.' 
— Which was agreed to. 

" Friday, Feb. 4, 1870. — The Chairman then made the following report 
in answer to the resolution directing him to communicate with the Presi. 
dent in relation to the testimony given on the gold-panic investigation : 
• In pursuance of the instructions of the Committee, I called upon the 
President of the United States and stated to him that in some of the testi- 
mony taken before the Committee personal reference was made to himself 
and to some of the members of his family, and that the Committee had autho 
rized me to lay before him that portion of the testimony, that he might 
make any suggestions or statement concerning it if he chose to do so. 
The President desired me to express his thanks to the Committee for their 
courtesy, and to say that he preferred not to see the testimony, nor to make 
any suggestions or statements in reference to it, during the progress of ths 
investigation.' " 



CHAPTER XI. 

IL SERVICE REFORM.— History of the movement. — A commission 
appointed to prescribe rules. — Rules adopted. — What Senator Carpenter 
says of this reform. — The Attorney-General's opinion. — The Civil Service 
plank in the office-holder's platform. — Later instances of the manner in 
which the President and his henchmen interpret the rules. 

The magnitude of the patronage which, under the 
constitution and laws, has been conferred upon the Presi- 
dent, in making appointments to civil office, will not fail 
to excite some degree of surprise among those who have 
given the subject no serious reflection, when we state 
that the number of incumbents appointed pursuant to 
that provision of the Constitution which prescribes that 
" the President shall nominate and, by and with the 
advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassa- 
dors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the 
Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United 
States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise pro- 
vided for, and which shall be established by law," has 
already reached tJiree thousand, and that under the acts of 
Congress, vesting the appointment of inferior officers of 
the Government also in the President, as authorized by 
the Constitution, the number of such inferior officers by 
him appointed extends to fifty thousand, making a grand 
total of fifty-three thousand office-holders, who receive 
their appointments at the hands of the Executive ! 

Although practically many of these minor offices are 
appointed by the Heads of Departments and Bureaus, it 
does not alter the fact, that the appointing powet is 
vested in the President. 

The " Tenure of Office Act " related to removals from 
office, without touching the question of appointments. 

(135) 



136 THE COMMISSION APPOINTED. 

Its operation was to prevent the dismissal of even a cor- 
rupt or incompetent incumbent by the power that ap- 
pointed him ; but it was soon perceived that this was 
legislating at the wrong end of the subject. At any rate, 
General Grant, who was decidedly in favor of this law 
for Mr. Johnson, was just as decidedly opposed to it for 
himself 

But the subject of reform in our Civil Service had 
taken too strong a hold upon Congress to be allowed to 
die out. As early as January, 1867, Mr. Jenckes, of 
Rhode Island, reported a bill for this object from the 
House Committee on Retrenchment, which failed to 
become a law. 

Again, after the lapse of more than a year, he brought 
forward a new plan for securing the much-needed re- 
forms. In the interim, Mr. Jenckes had been upon a 
Committee to investigate the whiskey frauds of New 
York City and Brooklyn, and was enabled to speak ad- 
visedly upon the subject. 

However his second measure also failed. In March, 
1 87 1, a section was added to the Civil Appropriation act 
in these words : 

"That the President of the United States be and he is hereby authorized 
to prescribe such rules and regulations for the admission of persons into 
the civil service of the United States as will best promote the efficiency 
thereof, and ascertain the fitness of each candidate in respect to age, health, 
character and ability for the branch of service into which he seeks to 
enter; and for this purpose the President is authorized to employ suitable 
persons to conduct said inquiries, to prescribe their duties, and to establish 
regulations for the conduct of persons who may receive appointments in 
the civil service." 

In the following June, the President appointed his 
Civil Service Commission, consisting of six members, of 
which George W. -Curtis of New York was chairman. 

On the 1 8th day of December last, this Commission 
made its report to the President, and submitted also, thir- 
teen rules to govern his action in making appointments 
to office. On the following day the President transmitted 



RULES TO GOVERN APPOINTMENTS. 137 

this report and the said rules to Congress, with an ac- 
companying message, wherein he informed that body 
that the rules had been adopted b}'- him, and would be 
put in operation on the first day of January, 1872, and 
faithfully executed thereafter, which was a promising 
beginning for the new year. 

The report of the commission goes on to say that, 
" the honest competitive examination is the only fundamental 
security against the power of mere patronage'' The right 
of removal from office was left untouched, upon the 
ground that it was " essential to the highest efficiency of 
the Service." 

By the terms of the thirteen rules, the President was 
to appoint three examiners in each Department, to ascer- 
tain the qualifications of applicants for appointment or 
promotion therein, and to recommend to him such only 
as were competent and worthy. 

Strange and unaccountable as it may appear to many of 
our readers, the course of the President met with gen- 
eral disapproval from the leaders of the administration 
party in both Houses of Congress, and acting upon that 
hint, on the nth day of January, he promulgated a 
fourteenth rule, suspending all the others I Thus matters 
remained until the i6th day of April, when nineteen new 
rules were established, according to which certain grades 
of officers are to be appointed to office after a competitive 
examination, but it is provided that " if no applicants 
under this regulation shall be found suitable and qualified, 
the vacancy will be filled at discretion^' that is to say, if 
the President is disposed to appoint the successful com- 
petitor before the examining board, very well ; if not, he 
will appoint whom he chooses. So it was that the two 
ends of the line which was to divide the competent from 
the incompetent, the worthy from the unworthy, meet at 
the precise point of beginning, forming a circle which 
embraces all alike. 

Mr. Carpenter, who is one of the four brazen pillars of 
the administration, in his late speech in the Senate Cham- 



138 MAT. carpenter's OPINION OF THE REFORM. 

ber, in opposition to this measure, is credited with tha 
remark that " in politics, * words are things,' and Civil 
Service Reform is a cunning catchword !" 

In this Mr. Carpenter is right. He could not have 
characterized the evident intention of the President, in 
flashing before the eyes of the people the glittering title 
of a great reform, after its body had been emasculated and 
its substance destroyed, in more fitting terms. This 
whole business of the Civil Service Reform is a sham 
and a deceit. What is to hinder the President from 
establishing such rules for his own government as he 
sees fit ? The Constitution which requires him " by and 
with the advice and consent of the Senate " to make 
appointments to office, does noX, prevent him from arriving 
at the selection in his own way. He cannot be dictated 
to one way or another ; but he may be " a law unto him- 
self," and only act after an examination into the qualifica- 
tions of his nominees, and he may himself prescribe the 
mode of conducting such examination. 

Congress never took any other ground ! That body did 
just what the Constitution had done beforehand. Their 
act was not original, it was merely declaratory. They 
authorized the President to " prescribe such rules and 
regulations for the admission of persons into the Civil 
Service of the United States as will best promote the 
efficiency thereof," etc., etc. He could have done this be- 
fore. Any officer in the Government may do the like in 
respect to subordinates appointed by him. It would be 
absurd for Congress to gravely enact that one who had 
been previously authorized to appoint a certain number 
of clerks in his department might prescribe rules to 
govern his selection of them, "in respect to age, health, 
character and ability ;" yet this is just what was done for 
General Grant in relation to the Civil Service, as if he 
could not have done it for himself In a word, the law 
has no force because it has nothing to act upon. The 
Commissioners said this at their first meeting and they 
unanimously agreed that their duties were merely ad- 



CIVIL SERVICE PLANK AT PHILADELPHIA. 1 39 

visory and recommendatory. They had no powers. There 
was nothing in the law itself which conflicted with the 
Constitution, because it gave them no powers. The case 
put by the Commissioners to the Attorney-General was 
an hypothesis ! for by the terms of the law the President 
was not bound by their recommendation at all ! 

The Attorney-General based his opinion upon the 
same hypothesis. He went wholly outside of the law for 
a peg to hang it upon. He supposes the case of a rule 
which required a vacant Civil office to be given to the fore- 
most in a competitive examination. There was no such 
rule, neither could there have been such a one, that could 
bind the President. The Constitution stands right in the 
way and leaves everything to his own discretion. 

For this reason the " Civil Service plank " in the late 
Philadelphia Convention goes for nothing !* 

If by its first proposition the Convention means to say 
that the " System of Civil Service " under General Grant 
has been " fatally demoralizing," we agree with it. If by 
the last they would have us beheve that the " evils of 
patronage," can be abolished by any system of laws, we 
do not agree with them. That can only be done in one of 
two ways ; you must either reform the President or 
amend the Constitution ! 

Any System of Civil Service Reform must begin with 
the Executive, and there is indeed small hope of it, with 
the present incumbent. 

The Philadelphia Convention was within its own body 
an illustration of the most shameless abuses of the " Civil 
Service." Everybody knows that it was packed like a 
herring-box, with the hirelings of the administration. For 

* The following is the " Civil Service" plank in the office-holders Phil* 
delphia platform ; 

" Any system of the Civil Service under which the subordinate posi- 
tions of the Government are considered rewards for mere party zeal is 
fatally demoralizing ; and we, therefore, favor a reform of the system by 
laws which shall abolish the evils of patronage, and make honesty, effi- 
ciency, and fidelity the essential qualifications for public position, without 
practically creating a life-tenure of office." 



140 THE PRESIDENT "YEARNING" FOR THE REFORM- 

the last two years, the work of distributing the public 
offices with a single eye to the renomination of General 
Grant, has been going on, and yet at the very garnering 
in of these abominations the whole price-labelled tribe 
could rise and cry out as with one voice " Stop thief T' 

It has its fitting parallel in the action of the Executive 
regarding the Civil Service, in asking Congress to pass a 
law to prevent his own prostitution of the appointing 
power, in a word — to protect him from himself ! of wnich 
there is, we grieve to say, much need ! 

Just as we go press, comes another instance of the 
President's illustration of what he considers " Civil Ser- 
vice Reform " to mean. He has just dismissed a post- 
master from a south-western city to make a place for one 
Clarke ; a scoundrel who got into a seat in Congress, by 
conspiring with the Governor of Texas, and held it against 
its rightful owner, knowing very well that he was not en- 
titled to it, till near the end of the session, when he was 
ignominiously turned out. While this news comes to 
us from the South, telegrams from the East tell us that 
Massachusetts demands the re-election of General Grant, 
" because he is positively yearning for the elevation of the 
Civil Service to the purest and highest possible standard I" 

And still later, we learn from Washington, that in the 
closing hours of the session, an amendment was smuggled 
into a section of the bill making appropriations for the 
Indian Department, the purpose of which was not dis- 
covered at the time, but which is now fully understood to 
have been placed there for no other purpose, than to 
enable the Secretary of the Interior to evade the Civil Ser- 
vice rules, and to make his appointments without subject- 
ing the candidate to a Civil Service examination ! Verily 
General Grant must be *' yearning " for the elevation of 
-he Civil Service ! ! 



CHAPTER XII. 

SALE OF ARMS TO FRANCE.— Neutrality proclamation of the PresU 
dent. — Arms and ammunition sold to France. — The Enabling Act. — The 
Secretary's construction and violation of it. — General Ingalls turns up 
again. — His interest in the matter. — Senator Patterson, — Secretary 
Robeson and the 10,000 Navy rifles. — His friend Markley. 

On the 22d day of August, 1870, the President issued 
his proclamation, announcing the neutrality of the United 
States in the impending war between France and 
Germany. 

The obligation of neutrality enjoined in this proclama- 
tion is universally recognized by neutrals towards bel- 
ligerents. 

At the period of its date our relations with both France 
and Germany were of the most friendly description, and 
the indulgence on the part of the United States, of parti- 
ality or favoritism towards either of those powers, then 
unhappily at war with each other, would have been a 
clear violation of national good faith, and a breach of one 
of the fundamental rules of international law. 

Notwithstanding these imperative obligations resting 
upon our Government, it has recently transpired that the 
War Department sold and delivered to French agents, 
during the progress of the Franco-German war, large 
quantities of breech-loading arms, together with immense 
supplies of ammunition suited to their use ; not only in 
open disregard of the tenor of the foregoing proclama- 
tion, but also against a positive law of Congress forbid- 
ding it. 

The law in question, which was passed in July, 1868, 
for the sole purpose of enabling the Government to get 

(141) 



142 THE ENABLING ACT. 

rid of its unserviceable arms and military stores, pro- 
vides : 

"That the Secretarj' of War be and he is hereby authorized and directed 
to cause to be sold, after offer at public sale on thirty days' notice, in such 
manner and at such times and places, at public or private sale, as he may 
deem most advantageous to the public interest, the old cannon, arms, and 
other ordnance stores now in possession of the War Department, which are 
damaged or otherwise unsuitable for the United States military service or 
for the militia of the United States, etc. 

It was a mere enabling Act, and was intended to pro- 
vide a way for disposing of the damaged and used-up 
arms, etc., employed in the rebellion, for which the 
Government had no further use.* 

The law itself contains two propositions : First, it em- 
powers the Secretary of War to sell " old cannon, arms, 
and other ordnance stores now" to wit : at the date of 
the passage of the Act, " in possession of the War De- 
partment, which are," also at the date of the Act, 
" damaged or otherwise unsuitable for the United States 
military service, or for the mihtia ; and. Second, it 
directs, as the House insisted it should, that before any 
private sale shall be made of them to any person, the said 
" old cannon, arms and other ordnance stores " shall 
be first offered at public sale, to wit : vendue, on thirty 
days' notice, to wit : notice by advertisement in the 
usual manner. 

The Secretary of War can have no greater authority 
over the properties of the United States entrusted to his 
keeping, than Congress has conferred upon him by law. 
It is also a settled rule that when the law provides a par- 
ticular way of doing a thing, it is to the exclusion of all 
other methods of doing it. 

In making an application of this rule to the law in 
question, we find that before the Secretary of War can 
legally cause even these old cannon, etc., to be sold, he 
is required to offer them at public sale, and to give thirty 
days' notice of the time and place of such sale. 
* The debates in the House show this. 



THE CONSTRUCTION PUT UPON IT. I43 

Upon failure to dispose of them at public sale, he was 
authorized to make private sales, but not before. 

It will strike the minds of our readers with no little 
surprise that the military officers in charge of the arms 
and ordnance stores of the Government, acting as they 
tell us, under the instructions of General Schofield, late 
Secretary of War, so construed this law as not only to 
extend it over new arms, but also limiting it to a mere 
sample, or specimen number, of the great bulk to be dis- 
posed of, and from time to time put upon the market and 
sold ; that is to say, if the Government happened to have 
50,000 muskets of a particular description for sale, the 
advertising of 50 of them would answer all the require- 
ments of the law, and after those fifty had been sold, pur- 
suant to such advertisement, the Secretary could go on 
and sell the additional 49,950 at private sale, at such 
times, to such persons, and for such price as he saw fit ; 
and this was the quality of reasoning in which they in- 
dulged respecting the sales of arms to the French 
Government.* 

There is, however, a greater objection to the validity 
of this sale. The arms were new, modern, and in excel- 
lent order. The cartridges were also perfect, so that 
they did not come under the provisions of the law at all, 
and the Secretary of War had no more right to sell them 
than any private citizen had. 

His authority over them was by virtue of his office, 
and that authority extended only to their safe keeping, or 
use by this Government. 

There is another flagrant violation of law connected 
with this transaction. Not only were these new arms 
and munitions of war sold, but contracts were made with 
agents of the French Government, to manufacture an 
immense amount of ammunition for them at the Govern- 
ment Arsenals ! 

This certainly was without color of law under which 
the blunderheads of the Administration can take shelter. 

* See testimony of General Dyer before French Arms Committee. 



144 GENERAL RUFUS INGALLS AGAIN. 

All these arms and war supplies were boxed up and 
shipped openly and advisedly to the French Govern- 
ment, through the medium of their agents in this 
country ! 

From the manner of conducting the affairs of Govern- 
ment which obtains in Washington, we do not look for 
an affair of this kind to be carried through without the 
intervention of some one of the military ring. In this in- 
stance he turns up in no less a personage than General 
Rufus Ingalls, and what is a Httle extraordinary in this 
connection, he owns up to having had, and disposed of 
$5,000 of the stock of the Remington Arms Company. 
The principals in this company were the agents of 
France in this transaction ! When, where, and how he 
got it he refuses to tell us; but he got $3,000 in money 
for it * 

Now, then, a word in reference to General Grant. 
Senator Patterson, of New Hampshire, who had once be- 
fore drawn upon himself the ill-will of the Administration, 
by what was conceived to be his over-zeal in the first of 
the New York Custom-House Investigating Committees, 
having obtained early information of the fraudulent sales 
of Government arms was careful to lose no time in laying 
it before the President as well as the Secretary of War. 
Both of these dignitaries expressed surprise at the infor- 
mation, which was of a character not to be doubted, and 
a desire for investigation ; the latter of the two promising 
to inquire into the facts of the case and report them to 

the Senate.f 

It is needless to say that neither the President nor the 
Secretary of War ever took a voluntary step in that 
direction. 

In the course of the French arms investigation, it acci- 
dentally leaked out that Secretary Robeson, of the Navy, 
had also obliged a friend of his, a Mr. Markley, by the 

* See testimony of General Rufus Ingalls before French Arms Com- 
mittee. 
t See testimony of Senator Patterson before French Arms Committee. 



SALE OF THE NAVY RIFLES. I45 

sale of 10,000 rifles belonging to the Navy Department, 
to Poultney & Trimble, of Baltimore, who acted as 
agents for the Remington Arms Company. These arms, 
too, were shipped to France. 

The singular feature of this latter transaction is, 
that although these arms could have been had for the 
asking, this friend and neighbor of the Secretary, who 
acted as middle-man, and was known to the Baltimore 
firm as a favorite of his, received ten thousand dollars in 
money for his part in the transaction, which, if we are to 
believe him, consisted only of a short and quite accidental 
interview with Mr. Robeson upon the street, in the 
course of which he obtained the highly valuable informa- 
tion that these arms were for sale to any one who desired 
to purchase them.* 

How does it happen that Mr. Markley has escaped a 
Government office? 

* See testimony of Mr. A. W. Markley before French Arms Committee 
"At the recent trial of the late French Consul-General at New York, 
Victor Place, whom the French Courts have convicted and sentenced for 
frauds on his own government in the purchase of arms and material, 
Remington and his book-keeper Norton were the principal witnesses, and 
it was chiefly through their evidence that Place was convicted, though 
Place's friends assert that he was sacrificed to save his American princi- 
pals. The sales to Thomas Richardson — to which Secretary Belknap's 
letter included in Mr. Sumner's preamble refers — are stated in General 
Dyer's official return, dated January 22, 1872, to have been 24,000 Spring- 
field breech-loaders (model i860), 1,600 Joslyn breech-loaders, 580 Spencers, 
and 3,922,280 cartridges. 

" C. K. Garrison, of New York, also had large contracts with agents of 
Gambetta, with which the French Government was greatly dissatisfied and 
in which they allege great frauds. General Dyer reports that Garrison 
purchased from the Department twenty six-gun Parrot batteries, to be de- 
livered in thirty-five days from December 24, 1870; but subsequently the 
French authorities refused to accept them on the ground that they were not 
furnished in time, and that the prices were exorbitant ; batteries which cost 
only $7,000 being charged to them at $15,000 each. While this last con- 
tract was pending, Minister Treilhard telegraphed his Government that 
General Rufus Ingalls had called, with Mr. Garrison, at the French Lega« 
tion, to urge that it be fulfilled and the bargain performed." 

10 



CHAPTER XIII. 

RECONSTRUCTION.— KU-KLUX.— What the soldiers thought of each 
other. — Social good feeling among them at the end of the war. — Recon- 
struction.— The mistake of Congress.— Carpet-baggers and the ruin 
they have brought upon the South. — The public debt of the recon- 
structed States in 1861 and in 1871. — The ten States divided into mili- 
tary districts. — Georgia said not to be reconstructed. — Governor Scott 
of South Carolina, and other governors report all quiet.— General Grant 
not satisfied and he declares a portion of South Carolina in insurrection. 
Reign of terror there !— Colonel Whitley with his horde of spies sent 
down South.— Another special message from the President on the sub- 
ject, followed by another proclamation. — The infamous Ku-Klux bill 
becomes a law. — Still another proclamation. — No necessity for any such 
law. — A special message from the President. — One element of virtue in 
the law. 

When, soon after the inauguration of the President, 
General Longstreet was appointed at his nomination, 
Surveyor of the Port of New Orleans, his selection met 
with the approval of all considerate men. Like the volun- 
tary signing of Jefferson Davis' bail bond on the part of 
those two representative men of the North, Horace 
Greeley and Gerritt Smith, it was a graceful recogni- 
tion that the war was at an end, and served as a sprink- 
ling of lethean waters over the past. 

Although, during the first year of the war, there exist- 
ed some degree of private animosity as regards the rank 
and file of the two armies, towards each other, owing, 
for the most part, to an inflamed state of the pubhc mind 
consequent upon the precipitation of sectional hostilities 
yet long before the end of the struggle, that feehng, except 
in rare instances, had wholly died out. 

Before the war, the intercourse between the middle 
and laboring white populations of the two sections, had 

(I4fi) 



GOOD FEELING BETWEEN THE ARMIES. 147 

been very much restricted, so much so, indeed, that at 
their first hostile meetings, they honestly believed all the 
exaggerated reports they had heard of the savagery of 
each other, but gradually, as the opportunities which 
even the rebellion afforded of a better acquaintance, 
were improved, their mutual prejudices wore away, and 
from thence their previous personal animosity substantially 
disappeared. There was no longer any feeling akin tc 
hatred between the opposing armies. All they appeared 
to know or care about the war was, that " their Governors 
had quarrelled," and so they were called out to shoot at 
each other, as it was the custom in such " cases." As be- 
tween themselves, they had no quarrel to settle. 

Many of our readers will remember the social good- 
feeling which existed upon the picket-lines of the two 
armies which the Rappahannock divided in front of Fred- 
ericksburg. It was one of the duties of the general officer 
of the day to break up this unwarlike sentiment, and cap- 
ture the little fleet of river sail which was sent to and fro 
between the lines, laden with exchanges of coffee and 
tobacco. 

In the absence of all restraint, the men in " blue and but- 
ternut " were accustomed to exchange views with each 
other, anxious enough to relate how they had been de- 
ceived. They said, too, that they could settle the issues 
of the war, if left to them, without a resort to powder 
and ball. These scattering seeds of kindness so accidentally 
sown along the outer rims of the two great armies, ger- 
minated even in that unfriendly soil, and sent forth many 
a slender stalk, generous of fruit, until at length it was a 
common thing for the men upon the picket hues to make 
truces between themselves, and sometimes, too, to meet 
each other upon middle ground with newspapers, giving 
and taking, from North and South, in spite of prohibition. 

Hence, when the South yielded her cause, there was no 
sign of opposition on their part ; none of resentment. The 
war-worn veterans, who had learned, as brave men will, to 
respect, if not to love, each other, laid down their enforced 



148 CARPET-BAGGERS AND RECONSTRUCTION. 

hostility with their arms, and withdrew to their respective 
* homes no longer enemies, but friends. 

Now came the work of reconstruction ; unfortunately for 
all concerned, there was still a party in the North, whose 
bitterness towards the prostrate South had never, in the 
least degree, abated. The leaders of this party had not 
belonged to the army, although they affected an inex- 
haustible supply of patriotism, and now that they could 
indulge a sentiment of revenge without incurring the 
danger of punishment, they set themselves at work to 
humiliate a brave people who had the misfortune to be in 
the minority. 

They first stripped them of their citizenship, and set 
their former slaves over them. After that, they provided 
a way for instituting new State governments. 

These governments were, for the most part, in the 
hands of the ignorant negro population, who, with no 
particular love for their old masters, and wholly without 
culture or experience — without even the knowledge of 
reading and writing, and owning no taxable property, 
became legislators, and made the laws, levied the taxes, 
and collected and disbursed the State revenues. They 
might, perhaps, have done this tolerably well with such 
honest assistants as they were able to obtain from among 
the better class of resident whites, if they had been left 
alone, but the new field of enterprise was too inviting to 
escape the attention of a horde of Northern adventurers, 
who flocked into the Southern States apparently for the 
sole object of deliberately and systematically, under the 
forms of legislation and the sanction of improvident laws, 
completing their ruin. 

Among them was a set of the most unprincipled 
scoundrels that ever escaped hanging. They allied 
themselves with the blacks by working on both their 
fears and their prejudices, completely controlling their 
political action, whereby some of the worst of these ad- 
venturers obtained possession of the public offices, whilst 
others controlled the State legislation, and thus by a 



FINANCIAL RUIN OF THE SOUTH. 



149 



regular system of public robbery and plunder, they were 
able to complete the financial ruin of nearly all the South- 
ern States. It is unnecessary to go into details, we will 
give the figures. The following table exhibits the old and 
new indebtedness of the ten reconstructed States. 



Debts and Liabilities. 

States. in i 861. In 187 1. Increase. 

Alabama $7,945,000 $52,761,917 $44,816,917 

Arkansas 2,084,179 19,398,000 17,313,821 

Florida ?,^o,^l^ 15,707,587 15*420,970 

Georgia 2,670,750 42,500,500 39,889,750 

Louisiana 11,000,000 40,021,734 29,021,734 

Mississippi None. 1,697,431 1,697,431 

North Carolina 12,689,245 34,887,474 22,198,219 

South Carolina 4,407,958 22,480,516 18,072,558 

Texas 2,000,000* 14,930,000 12,930,000 

Virginia 33,248,141 47,090,866 13,842,725 

Total $76,248,141 $291,626,025 $215,210,125 

Is it at all strange that under a state of things so vil- 
lainously outrageous, there should have been some dis- 
turbances of a riotous character in portions of these 
States ? Some banding together of citizens for self-pro- 
tection, if not for retaliation ? Our only wonder is that 
the wretched populace did not rise in a general revolt. 

There, was, however, nothing of the kind ; as a general 
thing they had had enough of war, and only yearned for 
peace. 

There were small disturbances and combinations of 
men commonly known as the " Ku-Klux Klan," who 
committed depredations which were sometimes attended 
with cruelty and violence, but the Governors of the re- 
spective States wherein they occurred, have severally 
stated that they were abundantly able to quell them with 
the State forces at their command. 

From the termination of the rebellion up to the begin 
• Contingent liabilities. Texas having no State debt in i860. 



150 CONDITION OF THE SOUTH IN 187O. 

ninof of the official term of General Grant, and later 
still, the peace and good order of the South had steadily 
improved. There was not and has not been any serious 
outbreak there, except in the case of the military mob, 
instigated by brother-in-law Casey, at New Orleans. 

But it is altogether beyond the scope and limitation of 
these pages for us to attempt, at this time, even a partial 
recounting of the wrongs which, under various pretexts 
of governmental necessity, have been inflicted upon the 
Southern States since the close of our late civil war, and 
^he cessation of sectional hostilities. 

Previous to the election of President Grant, the ten 
States which had espoused the cause of the rebellion, 
tvere divided into five military districts, and placed under 
nilitary rule as preliminary to their re-admission into 
the family of States under reconstructed civil govern- 
ments. 

At the date of his inauguration, all the States included 
in these mihtary districts, had resumed their civil functions 
pursuant to the Act of Congress, with the exception of 
Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas, 

On the 7th day of April, 1869, President Grant urged 
upon Congress, in a special message, the passage of a 
bill to complete the work of reconstruction in reference 
to these three outlying States. 

In response to the message of the President, Congress 
took immediate action in the premises, and before the 
beginning of the New- Year, the three States above- 
mentioned had formed their new State governments, 
thereby completing the work of reconstruction in each 
of the States theretofore in rebellion, and providing the 
way for their restoration to the Union, which was fully 
accomphshed as early as April, 1870. 

In the case of Georgia, however, which had been re- 
admitted in June of the previous year, there was still some 
trouble ; the Senate persisting in its refusal to admit the 
two Senators, Messrs. Hill and Miller, who had been 
chosen by the Georgia Legislature to seats in that body 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GEORGIA. 151 

Afterwards, by the Act of December 22d, 1869, Georgia 
was declared by Congress not reconstructed, and was 
turned over again to military rule. 

It is noteworthy here, that the new Constitution of 
Georgia, which had been found acceptable to Congress 
upon the re-admission of that State, did not provide for 
the holding of office by negroes ; and some of this class, 
who claimed to have been duly chosen to the Legislature, 
which elected Messrs. Hill and Miller, had been refused 
seats therein. 

This action of the Legislature did not meet the approval 
of the United States Senate, at whose instance Governor 
Bullock, of Georgia, was authorized to call the old negro 
Legislature together, which met accordingly on the 
26th day of January, 1870, and reorganized by electing 
Republican officers. They also excluded nine white 
persons as ineligible, and filled their places with Re- 
publicans, black and white, who received the next highest 
number of votes. The same thing was done in reference 
to three Senators whom General Perry, Military Com* 
mander, declared ineligible. 

The Georgia Legislature, in this manner reformed and 
reorganized, proceeded to the election of United States 
Senators ; and in July following, Congress, for the second 
time, passed an Act admitting Georgia to congressional 
representation. 

In the meantime, affairs in the Southern States, in re- 
spect to the safety of life and the security of property, no 
less than the peace and good order of the citizens gener- 
ally, had steadily improved. In confirmation of this, we 
have the indisputable testimony of the Governors of the 
respective States, and the United States civil and military 
officers residing in different localities throughout the 
South.* 

* In respect to the condition of the South at this time, Captain Evan 
Thomas, writing from Robinson County; Major Stewart, stationed at Fort 
Macon ; Captain Frank G. Smith, stationed at Raleigh ; and Captain John 
Mendenhall, stationed 'at Fort Johnson ; all officers of the Fourth Artillery, 
Dear uniform testimony to the quiet and undisturbed condition of things in 



152 COLONEL WHITLEY AND HIS SPIES. 

Governor Scott, of South Carolina, says, in his message 
to the Legislature of January i6th, 1871 : "I cannot say 
with truth, upon any information in my possession, that 
in any section of the State, the laws are not executed ; for 
not a single case has been reported in which the officers of 
the law have been resisted in the discharge of their 
duties." 

But, General Grant was not satisfied with the informa- 
tion derived from the Governors of States, and the United 
States civil and military officers residing at the South, as 
to the good-will and peaceful disposition of the inhabi- 
tants of all classes in respect to the Government and to- 
wards each other. 

The State of Georgia, after having been twice recon- 
structed, had gone Democratic, and this to his mind was 
evidence enough that something was wrong. He had 
heard too the most startUng rumors of cruelties and 
crimes perpetrated by the " Ku-Klux Klan," and notwith- 
standing the Governors of the ten reconstructed States 
without exception had signified the ability of the local au- 
thorities to enforce the execution of the laws, quell all dis- 
turbances of the peace and bring to justice those who 
were guilty of crime, General Grant determined to help 
them in his own expeditious and summary way. 

As a preliminary step in that direction, he enlisted in 
this enterprise the notorious Colonel Whitley, Chief of the 
Bureau of Secret Service, who despatched into the South 
a horde of spies to prowl about the country and give infor- 
mation against such of the white population as were so 

their respective localities. Captain Mendenhall says: "The people so far 
as I know or can learn, are good, peaceable, law-abiding citizens. Such, 
too, is the evidence of Colonel Henry J. Hunt of the Fifth Artillery, State 
Commandant. 

In transmitting their January messages to the Legislatures of their re- 
spective States, in 1871, Governor Scott, of South Carolina ; Governor War 
moth, of Louisiana; and Governor Clayton, of Arkansas, affirmed the same 
thing. 

In March following. Governor Alcorn, of Mississippi, sent a dispatch to 
the Honorable Mr. Morphis, M. C, testifying to the " civil obedience and 
order " of the people of that State. 



president's messages and proclamations. 153 

unfortunate as to incur either their ill-will or their sus- 
picions. They did not scruple to give full scope to 
both. 

In addition to these villainous Paul Prys, that distin- 
guished ex-Rebel and Jurist, the late Attorney-General 
Akerman, was sent into South Carolina upon the same 
errand. 

It is not surprising that with the help of these well- 
qualified aids who so well understood what was requir- 
ed of them, General Grant should have been put in pos- 
session of just such information as he desired to obtain ; 
and so on the 13th day of January, 1871, the President 
transmitted to the Senate " abstracts of reports and other 
papers on file in the War Department, relative to the out- 
rages in North Carolina, and also, for the information of 
the Senate, those relative to outrages in the other South- 
ern States." 

It would appear from the wording of the communica- 
tion of the President, that the outrages to which he had 
alluded had just transpired, whereas from the abstracts 
sent in it was found that they occurred in the years 1866, 
1867, and 1868, none of them being at that time of recent 
date. 

On the 23d day of March following, the President sent 
in a special message in which he said, " A condition of 
affairs now exists in some of the States of the Union, ren- 
dering life and property insecure, and the carrying of the 
mails and collection of the revenue dangerous. That the 
power to correct these evils is beyond the control of the 
State authorities, I do not doubt ; that the power of the 
Executive of the United States, acting within the limits 
of the existing laws, is sufficient for the present exigency 
is not clear; therefore I urgently recommend such legis- 
lation as, in the judgment of Congress, shall eflfectually 
secure life, liberty, and property in all parts of the United 
States." 

It was on the very next day that the President issued 
his proclamation declaring that an insurrection then 



154 THE KU-KLUX BILL. 

existed in South Carolina and warning all engaged there 
in, to disperse to their homes within " twenty da)^s." 

On the 29th day of April, 1871, that most infamous and 
tyrannical measure known as the " Ku-Klux Bill," became 
i law. We have seen that it had been specially solicited 
by the President, and those who are ignorant of his lead- 
ing instincts, may be able to comfort themselves with the 
belief, or we should rather say, the delusion, that the de- 
sign of the Executive in urging upon Congress the pas- 
sage of that law was to do a substantial service to his 
country ! For more than twenty days this bill was de- 
bated by Congress, before being put upon its passage, 
during which its alarming features were held up to view 
and its dangerous infractions of Constitutional right laid 
bare ; but to no purpose. 

Before proceeding further let us examine its leading 
features. 

It is provided by the Constitution that the " privilege 
of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless 
when in case of rebeUion or invasion, the public safety 
may require it." 

In order, therefore, to justify a suspension of this writ, 
which is one of personal liberty, there must not only be a 
case of rebellion or invasion, but it must be of such magni- 
tude as to endanger the public safety. 

By the " Ku-Klux " bill the President was to be the 
judge as to whether a state of rebellion existed or not, 
and in case he should determine in his own mind that such 
a state did exist in any section of the Union^ of less magni- 
tude even than a State, he was authorized to suspend 
therein the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus and em- 
ploy the Federal troops as well as the naval forces to re- 
store order under martial law, without waiting for an ap- 
plication for assistance from the State authorities. 

On the 3d day of May, 1871, President Grant issued his 
proclamation reciting the passage of this act and " enjoin- 
ing upon all good citizens, and especially upon all public 
officers, to be zealous in the enforcement thereof." And 



A STATE OF INSURRECTION PROCLAIMED. 155 

what would seem to be of no little significance the pro- 
clamation goes on to state, that " This law of Congress 
applies to all parts of the United States, and will be en- 
forced everywhere to the extent of the powers vested in 
the Executive." 

If this was not converting the republic into a despotism 
we scarcely know by what means that deed could be ac- 
complished. But we have not yet done with this law. 

Jurisdiction was also conferred upon the Federal courts, 
is all as suits for damages between citizens of the same 
State growing out of any insurrectionary abuses or in- 
fringement of personal rights, and in order to make sure 
a conviction, the judge of such court was authorized to 
exclude from the grand or petit jury any person who 
in his judgment had been concerned with " any such com- 
bination or conspiracy." Taking this altogether we have 
a system of tyranny and oppression from which there 
could be no escape. 

On the 1 2th day of October, 1871, the President issued 
his second proclamation, reciting the existence of an in- 
surrection in five counties of the State of South Carolina, 
including the county of Marion, and on the seventeenth 
of the same month he issued a third proclamation, sus- 
pending the writ of habeas corpus in the counties named. 

One would naturally be led to suppose that, in a pro- 
ceeding of this gravity, the President would make very 
sure that he was right in every essential particular, before 
subjecting the citizens of any locality to measures which, 
if carried into effect in the mildest manner, could not 
fail to be extremely burdensome and oppressive. But 
the careless, off-hand sort of a way in which General 
Grant performed his part of the business has been made 
apparent by the commission of a blunder altogether 
without excuse. It was never pretended that an insur- 
rection existed in the county of Marion ; nor, indeed, 
that there was any public disorder there whatever. The 
including of this county in the proclamation was a mis- 
take which the President may have been led into by the 



156 REIGN OF TERROR IN SOUTH CAROLINA. 

unreliable information of Colonel Whitley's spies, and so 
on the 3d day of November, he issued a fourth proclama- 
tion, relieving- Marion county, and bringing the county 
of Union within the operation of the law ! 

And now began a reign of terror in those counties of 
South Carolina which had been given over to the tender 
mercies of the Executive ! 

Offences which had been committed months, even 
years before, and almost forgotten, were hunted out, and 
the offenders thrust into prison. Old men, who were 
innocent of any wrong, were seized and hurried from 
their homes. Others were tried, and condemned upon 
the testimony of witnesses too low in the scale of morals 
to be entitled to belief Respectable citizens were 
marched in squads through the public streets hand-cuffed, 
and guarded by soldiers; crowds of colored men, women 
and children followed in the rear, yelling and cursing 
them. None of these men had committed any recent 
offence, and some of them were without stain. In many 
places the prisoners were huddled, thirty and forty to- 
gether, into rooms without an article of furniture, and 
filthy in the extreme. They were not allowed to com- 
municate either with friends or counsel. In whole coun- 
ties all business was suspended, and those who had 
temporarily escaped fled for safety. 

Senator Bayard, from the committee of the Senate to 
investigate the " Ku-Klux " in Georgia, has given us a 
picture of the wretched state of things there, and also in 
Florida ; and yet, he tells us that the respectable and 
trustworthy citizens who were examined, many of them 
Republicans,and some of them Union soldiers, bore conclu- 
sive testimony to the " peaceful disposition of the people." * 

* The report of Attorney-General Williams, in response to a resolution 
of the House of Representatives shows, that five hundred and one persons 
were arrested in South Carolina, in pursuance of the " Ku-Klux " Act. 

In North Carolina, nine hundred and forty-four persons were indicted 
for violations of that Act. 

One hundred and fifty-two have been indicted in the Southern, and four 
liundred and ninety in the Northern District of Mississippi. 



KU-KLUX MESSAGE OF THE PRESIDENT. 1 57 

Nearly all the indictments which were found against 
these parties were for offences committed before the pas- 
sage of the " Ku-Klux " act. 

Nothing could be more conclusive than the fact that at 
the time of the ** Ku-Klux " legislation in Congress, and 
the putting in force of this Act in various parts of the 
South, there was no disturbance there which justified it, 
neither has there since been. 

On the 19th day of April, of the present year, President 
Grant, in response to a resolution of the House of Repre- 
sentatives, sent in the following message : 

' To the House of Representatives : 

" In answer to the resolution of the House of Representatives of January 
25, I have the honor to submit the following, accompanied by the report of 
the Attorney-General, to whom the resolution was referred : 

" Representations having been made to me that in certain portions of 
South Carolina a condition of lawlessness and terror existed, I requested 
the then Attorney-General (Akerman) to visit the State, and after personal 
examination, to report to me the facts in relation to the subject. On the 
i6th of October last he addressed a communication from South Carolina, 
in which he stated that in the counties of Spartanburg, York, Chester, 
Union, Laurens, Newbury, Fairfield, Lancaster, and Chesterfield, there 
were combinations for the purpose of preventing the free political 
actions of citizens who were friendly to the Constitution and the govern- 
ment of the United States, and of depriving the emancipated class of the 
equal protection of the laws. These combinations embrace at least two- 
thirds of the active white men of those counties, and have the sympathy 
and countenance of the majority of the other third. They are connected 
with similar combinations in other counties and States, and no doubt are 
part of a grand system of criminal associations pervading most of the 
Southern States. The members are bound to obedience and secrecy by 
oaths which they are taught to regard as of higher obligation than the law- 
ful oaths taken before civil magistrates ; they are organized and armed ; 
they eflfect their objects by personal violence, often extending to murder ; 
they terrify witnesses ; they control juries in the State courts, and some- 
times in the courts of the United States ; systematic spying is one of the 
means by which prosecution of the members is defeated. From informa- 
tion given by officers of the State and of the United States, and by credible 
private citizens, I am justified in affirming that the instances of criminal 
violence perpetrated by these combinations within the last twelve months, 
;n the above-named counties, could be reckoned by thousands. 

" I received information of a similar import from various sources, among 
which were the joint committee of Congress upon Southern outrages, the 
officers of the State, the military officers of the United States on duty in 



158 FALSE KU-KLUX RUMORS. 

South Carolina, the United States Attorney and Marshal, and other officers 
of the Government, repentant and abjuring members of these unlawful or 
ganizations, persons specially employed by the department of justice to 
detect crimes against the United States, and from other credible sources. 
Most, if not all of this information, except that I derived from the Attorney- 
General, came to me orally, and was to the effect that said counties were 
under the sway of the powerful combinations popularly known as the 
" Ku-Klux Klan," the objects of which were, by force and terror, to prevent 
all political action not in accord with the views of the members, to deprive 
colored citizens of the right to bear arms, and of the right to a free ballot, 
to suppress schools in which colored children were taught, and to reduce 
the colored people to a condition closely akin to that of slaves ; that these 
combinations were organized and armed, and had rendered the local law 
ineffectual to protect the classes whom they desired to oppress ; that they 
had perpetrated many murders and hundreds of crimes of minor degree, 
all of which were unpunished, and that witnesses could not safely testify in 
courts there unless the more active members were placed under restraint. 

" U. S. GRANT." 

" Executive Mansion, April 19, 1872. 

The resolution of the House called for circumstantial 
details of what had been done in the South, under the 
" Ku-Klux Act," and they got this rigmarole of a message, 
showing that it was upon mere rumor and idle reports 
that the President acted in proclaiming martial law in 
South Carolina. 

There was only one case of the burning of a school- 
house, and the evidence entirely failed to fix it upon the 
mythical " Ku-Klux." 

The stories to which the President was wont to listen 
were vastly overdrawn, and he may have been in a frame 
of mind to magnify them still more. Even if the state- 
ments contained in this message were true, it does not 
show a state of things which would justify the enforce- 
ment of martial law and the suspension of the privileges 
of the writ of habeas corpus. 

But, unfortunately for General Grant, many of those 
reports are highly exaggerated, and others are not only 
false, but vindictive towards the citizens of those coun- 
ties which he has named. According to his ratmg, 
eleven-twelfths of the white population have been, within 
the last twelve months, secretly leagued against the 



END OF MARTIAL LAW. 155 

blacks. This is too great a stretch of figures to be 
credited with belief. 

There is, however, an element of virtue in the " Ku- 
Klux " Act of which the South is likely to receive the im- 
mediate benefit. By the terms of the fourth section, 
under which the " privileges of the writ of habeas corpus " 
have been suspended in certain localities, it is provided that 
that section " shall not be in force after the end of" the 
present session in Congress ; and, notwithstanding the 
President has used every possible means at his command to 
secure its continuance in force till after the next Presiden- 
tial election, even descending to play the part of lobbyist at 
the Capitol, as in the instance of the struggle in the 
Senate on the Santo Domingo Treaty, the House has 
refused by a decided vote to comply with his demands. 

We sincerely congratulate the people of the Southern 
States, of all races and shades of color, upon the over- 
throw of that most pernicious and unnecessary measure, 
alike destructive of public justice and human liberty. 

It is just this class of legislation which has done more 
than all things else to keep alive the unfortunate issues of 
the rebellion, and array against each other two races of 
men who, under a wise and conciliatory system, would 
be found to be a mutual advantage and protection to each 
other, dividing the responsibilities and sharing together 
the blessings of free government. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

APPOINTMENTS and APPOINTEES. 

Borie, Secretary Navy. — He nominates his successor Robeson, who 
arranges to pay the fraudulent Secor claims, and the old Governor 
claim. — The 10,000 Navy rifles. — Governor Blair's report. The Post- 
master-general and the Chorpening claim. — He lobbies in the whisky 
frauds interest. — The Secretaries ofWar and the Interior. — Delano and 
the Georgia Railroad. — Secretary Fish, his son-in-law and the Spanish 
gun-boats. — General Butterfield and Black Friday. — Legate, Governor 
of Washington Territory. — George H. Butler, U. S. Consul-General to 
Egypt. — His qualifications. — W. W, Holden of North Carolina, Minister 
to Peru ! 

The first Secretary of the Navy, under General Grant, 
was Adolphe Borie, of Philadelphia, a gentleman of large 
wealth, who had contributed liberally to the fund ex- 
pended in the purchase of a house for General Grant in 
that city, and upon the sale of which the latter is said to 
have realized a handsome sum of money. 

It is reported that General Grant was favorably struck 
with the manner in which Mr. Borie's mime j^^ured upon 
the subscription list, and made some pertinent inquiries 
about him at that time. 

When his nomination was sent to the Senate for con- 
firmation, there was a good deal of inquiry, especially 
among the officers of the Navy, as to who and what man- 
ner of man he was, for neither the name nor fame of Mr. 
Borie had gone much abroad. 

We know very little of his administration of the Navy 
Department, his term having been a very brief one ; for, 
on the 25th of June, 1870, less than two months after his 
appointment, Mr. Borie resigned his office. 

But, there was one privilege accorded to Mr. Borie 
upon his retirement, which is quite unusual. He was 
(160) 



BORIE NOMINATES ROBESON. l6l 

permitted to name his successor — the Hon. George M. 
Robeson, of New Jersey ! 

In one respect at least, Mr. Robeson resembled Mr. 
Borie, for neither of these gentlemen had any special 
knowledge of naval affairs. Mr. Robeson, however, had 
the advantage of being a lawyer, and was supposed to be 
able to bring to bear upon his official duties, a certain 
amount of legal talent which might be made available 
to the Government in many ways, and it certainly would 
appear from the manner in which he conducted the 
affairs of his office, that the old habit of diving into 
musty files of papers, and raking new issues out of old 
settlements, was continually upon him. 

At any rate, one of his first achievements was to dis- 
cover that there was a very large sum of money due 
to his friends Messrs. Secor & Co., on a contract made 
in 1862, for building three iron-clads for the Govern- 
ment. 

It is true, the Government had not only paid the 
Messrs. Secor the whole of the contract price for these 
vessels, but a large " bill of extras " besides, making a 
total of $1,901,195.58, which entirely closed their trans- 
action with the Government. 

All this was prior to the year 1865. 

The Messrs. Secor, however, whilst they admitted 
that the Government had kept its faith with them, com- 
plained, with others, that they had sustained heavy 
losses on account of the rapid advance in the price of 
materials and labor, and they united, with some forty 
other contractors, for building iron-clads, in a petition to 
Congress for relief, backed up by a powerful " lobby." 

Finally, after a good deal of boring and some special 
legislation, all these claims, including that of the Messrs. 
Secor, were adjusted and paid off by the Government. 
In this settlement the Secors received the sum of $115, - 
539.01 ; the Act under which it was paid to them con- 
taining these words, " which shall be in full discharge 
of all claims against the United States, on account of 
II 



l62 SECORS MAKE ANOTHER HAUL. 

the vessels upon which the Board made the allowance, 
etc. 

The Secors accepted this money in full payment of 
all demands against the Government, and any lawyer 
other than Mr. Robeson, would have known it to be the 
end of this business ; but not so he, for after assuming 
the duties of Secretary of the Navy, almost his first act 
was to dig out this old claim and set the machinery in 
motion which furnished him with the thinnest possible 
excuse for paying it ; and he did pay the Messrs. Secor 
ninety -three thousatid dollars out of the appropriations for 
the Navy Department for the current year! He paid it in 
hot haste, and upon a holiday, altogether on his own re- 
sponsibility, not only in violation of law, but also of the 
rules and usages of the Navy Department, as old as the 
Department itself; and when this is brought to Kght he 
has the effrontery to tell us that " it all depends upon 
the construction of a statute." 

So do the crime of theft and the penalty of hanging 
Mr. Secretary.* 

But this is not the only instance in which Secretary 
Robeson has taken the law into his own hands. 

There is the case of the steamer " Governor," swamped 
at sea whilst in the service of the Government. 

At first, the claim to which her loss gave rise, was re- 
jected by him. Afterwards it was allowed, at $52,000; 

* The following extract is from the minority report of Governor Blair : 

" That this payment was not only without law, but in direct violation of 
law, there can be no doubt whatever. It took out of the Treasury $93,000, 
against the prohibition of a plain statute, and gave it to parties to whom 
the Government owed nothing. It was done also against a wholesome 
rule of the Department, that one administration shall not open accounts 
which have been closed by another — its predecessor. 

" The money was taken out of the appropriation made by Congress to 
pay the current expenses of the Navy Department for the current year, to 
pay an old iron-clad claim. Admiral Porter had remonstrated against it, 
and Mr. Lenthal had declared it illegal. 

" It has been euggested by the friends of the Secretary, and by himself, 
that it was a question of the construction of the statute. But the statute is 
too clear for construction. The claim had been brought before Congress, 
patiently heard and settled in full, and the Secretary knew it." 



ROBESON AND THE NAVY RIFLES. 1 63 

fifty per cent, of which was divided among the solicitors 
before the Department, one of whom was Mr. Simeon 
Johnson, who appeared in the Secor case, and who had 
been newly tacked on at the suggestion of a friend of the 
parties. There is something rotten in any department 
where one half of an honest claim must be given away in 
order to secure its payment ! 

Our readers will not have forgotten the little aifair 
that leaked out in the course of the French arms investi- 
gation. 

An intimate friend of the Secretary's was employed by 
a Philadelphia firm to negotiate the purchase of 10,000 
Navy rifles,for which,if successful, the agent was to receive 
one dollar on each rifle as his commission. It was ac- 
cepted, and the agent received $10,000 for half an hour's 
work. 

Now, if these rifles were for sale to whomsoever should 
apply for them^ as the Secretary would give us to under- 
stand, why was it necessary for Poultney and Trimble to 
employ Mr. Markley to induce the Secretary to sell them 
at a loss to themselves of ten thousand dollars ? or why 
should our Government lose $10,000 by selling these rifles 
so much below what Poultney and Trimble were willing 
to pay for them ? 

Either our Government or Poultney and Trimble lost 
ten thousand dollars quite unnecessarily, if what the 
Secretary says is true. In speaking of the contract made 
by Mr. Robeson, on behalf of the Government, with Mr. 
John Roach, of New York, for marine engines to be set up 
in the U. S. steamer Tennessee, at a cost of nearly four 
hundred thousand dollars, and also with C. Pennock, for 
two iron torpedo boats, without allowing any competition 
in either case, through advertising for proposals to do 
the work, Governor Blair, in his report, says : 

"That Mr. Roach has a most excellent bargain for himself there can be 
no doubt whatever. He made it substantially as he wished, and had no 
impertinent interference by other people. The other people had no 
means of knowing anything about it. It was a private correspondence, set 



164 ROBESON DISPENSING THE PUBLIC FUNDS. 

on foot bj' Mr. Roach himself, and obligingly kept from the public by the 
Secretary of the Navy. Mr. Roach thinks no one else could have inter- 
fered, but he prudently prevented all danger by having the matter kept en- 
tirely quiet. 

" What has been said in regard to the contract for the repair of the 
steamer Tennessee, applies equally to the contracts for the torpedo boats. 
They were made without advertisement, and much in the same manner. 
The prices paid are no doubt somewhat higher than they would have been 
if competition had been invited. 

" Mr. Abram S. Hewitt, a very intelligent iron maker, testifies that the 
iron contracted for with C. Pennock, should have been furnished at a much 
lower rate, and there seems little doubt that such is the fact." 

One hundred and forty-one thousand dollars were 
proven, before the House Committee of Investigation, to 
have been paid out by Secretary Robeson, in clear viola- 
tion of law ; ninety -three thousand of which were paid to 
the friends of the Secretary, to whom the Government 
was not indebted to the extent of a penny. 

Not only this, but the whole course of action, in regard 
to the Secor swindle, from hunting it out of its tomb of 
a pigeon-hole, among forty others just like it, to its 
hurried payment upon the order of the Secretary, upon 
New- Year's day, against the custom of the Departments, 
was managed and specially directed by the Secretary 
himself. 

Indeed, ever since he has been in office this " Jersey 
lawyer," who has been growing rich all the time, has per- 
sistently violated the law by thrusting aside all the safe- 
guards of his office against the worst of abuses and 
frauds ; paying off" rejected claims, making immense con- 
tracts, trading off" Government property, building boats, 
and purchasuig Naval supplies without color of right, or 
the trouble ot advertising. 

It is in this way that hundreds of thousands of the 
public moneys have been squandered or lavished upon 
favorites ; and yet, Mr. Secretary Robeson is not onlj 
retained in office, but stands higher than ever in the esti- 
mation of the President ! 

The Postmaster-general has also been charged with 
squandering the public moneys in a manner altogether 



THE CHORPENING FRAUD. 1 65 

without precedent or justification. Since his official term 
the practice of making straw bids for carrying the U. S 
Mails in some of the States has grown into a regular sys* 
tern. The way of it is this : A mail route is offered for 
competition in the usual manner. There are many honest 
competitors, but also some dishonest ones, who procure 
offers to be made by fictitious bidders below any reason- 
able rate. When the contract is to be given out, these 
under-bidders do not appear, and as the Postmaster-gen- 
eral can only award it to the lowest bidder, he may pro- 
ceed to let the contract for the time being by private 
agreement ! By this course honest bidders are thrown 
out and dishonest ones put in at an immense loss to the 
Government. 

The Postmaster-general also assisted the notorious 
Chorpening to draw no less a sum than $zj44,ooo from the 
U. S. Treasury in settlement of a fraudulent and dishonest 
claim, upon which not a dollar was justly due. 

In allusion to this act, Mr. Dawes, of Massachusetts, 
remarked : 

" The Postmaster-General, in my opinion, as I told him, and as I have 
told this House, should have stopped in his investigation before he came 
to a conclusion which entitled this party to draw out of the Treasury the 
sum of $444,000, when there had been filed in his department time and 
again the report of those to whom that claim had been submitted, to the 
eflfect that not a dollar was due to the claimant." 

The Postmaster-general too, in imitation of his official 
superior, has tried his hand at lobbying, and if we are to 
credit his statement, not without avail, for at the time 
when, at the earnest solicitation of Secretary Boutwell, a 
joint resolution was introduced into Congress, which, if 
passed, would render possible a thorough investigation of 
the great whisky frauds in Baltimore, Mr. Creswell illus- 
trated his position in respect to the movement in a letter 
to one of the " ring " as follows : 

"Washington, May 8, 1870. 
" Thomas M. Lanahan, Esq, 

" My Dear Sir : As regards the joint resolution introduced by Butler 
and now pending in the Senate, you can say to our friends that there is na 



l66 OTHER SECRETARIES GO FOR PLUNDER. 

Janger of it passing in that shape. / have thrown my personal and political 
'aijluence against it, and apprehend no danger in defeating it. 

" Very respectfully, 

" J. A. J. Creswell." 

Nor have the Secretaries of War and the Interior been 
at all backward in improving the opportunities afforded 
by their respective offices to turn an honest penny or 
obHge a friend. The former being, Hke his companion 
of the Navy, of the legal profession, deals largely in 
" statutory construction," but he has had the greater fore- 
sight to originate the laws and then construe them to suit 
himself, and in order that they may not occupy too much 
attention on their passage, he is in the habit of tacking them 
on as riders to the Appropriation Bill. It was in this way 
that the free trading system upon the Indian frontier 
was abolished or changed into a few profitable monopo- 
lies, the brother-in-law of the Secretary, in imitation of a 
noted example, being appointed to the most desirable of 
them. These trading districts have actually been farmed 
out by the appointees of the Secretary at the rate of one 
thousand dollars a month, 2i^di this too for the sole privilege 
of selling goods to the " noble red men ;" so that the ef- 
fect of the law is not to provide discreet and capable trad- 
ers, but to create monopoUes to be themselves traded in ! 

A similar exploit of the Secretary of the Interior, allud- 
ed to elsewhere, was an innocent little " rider " which over- 
rides the " Civil Service " rules for making appointments 
of clerks in his Department. 

Mr. Delano has also tried his hand at Railroading, at least 
he, together with a few unconditional Grant men, have 
obtained the lease of the principal road in Georgia, with 
the help of Governor Bullock, at eleven thousand dollars 
a month less than a another respectable company stood 
ready to pay for it.* 

We should not pass over the most important Depart- 

* " The " Western and Atlantic Railroad " of Georgia, was leased by Gov- 
itnor Bullock to Secretary Delano and others, for $25,000 a month, al- 
:hough another company stood ready to take it at $36,000 a month. 



GEN. BUTTERFIELD ASS'T SUB-TREASURER. 1 67 

ment of the Secretary of State in silence, for whilst we 
are free to say that it is our unwavering conviction that 
its Honorable incumbent is above and beyond even the 
suspicion of dishonesty, yet that he is not altogether " the 
right man in the right place " at this juncture of our 
national affairs, is a common belief 

It is to the Secretary of State that we are wont to turn 
for a clear enunciation of, and firm adhesion to, the Ameri- 
can doctrines in our intercourse with other nations. Upon 
him too we are accustomed to rely for a becoming atti- 
tude in all individual cases of wrong or oppression at the 
hands of foreign powers. 

It is not too much to say that the course of Mr. Fish in 
these regards, especially in reference to Cuba and San 
Domingo has come far short of the mark. What could be 
more humiHating in this connection, than the circum- 
stance that the Spanish authorities, guided doubtless by 
the estimate which their advisers have formed of us, 
thought it expedient to employ as their counsel in the 
matter of the Spanish gunboats, detained at our wharves, 
the son^n-law of Mr. Fish, who was at that date a com- 
paratively obscure practitioner of his profession in the City 
of New York. How is it that our Ministers of State have 
acquired a reputation here and elsewhere, so low in the 
scale of political morals, as to justify the imputation to 
which this employment gives rise ? 

Those to whom this inquiry is most pertinent may also 
be able to tell us, upon what grounds of belief respectable 
foreign journals have recently pointed out the Adminis- 
tration of General Grant, as the most corrupt of any on 
the face of the earth ! 

General Butterfield whilst still an officer of the army, 
was appointed Assistant Treasurer of the United States, 
at the New York Sub-Treasury ! 

We should hardly think it worth while to mention a 
circumstance which has become such an '* old story " in 
Jhe practice of our model President, were it not that the 
Assistant Treasurer was most suspiciously mixed up 



1 68 JAMES F. LEGATE. 

with the Black-Friday gold muddle ot Fisk, Gould & Co. 
and unless rumor does him great injustice, his individual 
share of the profits of that adventure were by no means 
inconsiderable. 

At any rate, when a Committee of Congress was about 
to be sent on to make some inquiries into the General's 
connection with this outrage, he relieved himself from 
their disagreeable inquisitiveness, by hastily resigning his 
office. 

It is quite likely that it was pretty well understood at 
Washington, that in a certain event, that resignation 
should be sent in, and immediately accepted. 

But the people had a double hold upon General But- 
terfield, for he was still an officer of the army, and an 
advance was made upon his new position. The General, 
however, was too old a soldier to allow himself to be sur- 
prised upon his post and he resigned his military office 
also, and the committee fell back upon the main body at 
Washington. 

We extract the following from General Butterfield's 
little work upon " Out-Post duty :" 

" Hold the enemy in check as long as possible when compelled to retire." 

One of the President's later appointments to office, is 
that of the notorious James F. Legate, of Kansas, to be 
Governor of Washington Territory, and yet the Presi- 
dent must have known enough of this Legate's connec- 
tion with the Kansas election frauds to require no ad- 
ditional proofs of his utter unfitness for an office of such 
great responsibility, or in truth for any office at all. 

In speaking of this appointment the Springfield Repub- 
lican says that although " his (Legate's) transfer from 
Kansas will unquestionably be a benefit to that State and 
its people, the placing him over those of Washington Ter- 
ritory only increases his capacity for mischief." And the 
writer of that paragraph was familiar with his political 
record, for it is notorious ! 

We might follow out the subject of Executive appoint- 



GEORGE H. BUTLER. 1 69 

ments to almost any extent, showing how it was that the 
President elevated to places of honor and trust, those 
whom, by the exercise of ordinary prudence, he must 
have known to be already corrupt in morals and bank- 
rupt in principle ! but the subject is not a pleasant one, 
and we are constrained to be done with it. 

But even beyond the members of his Cabinet, family 
relations and military favorites, the appointments to office 
made by General Grant have been in very many instances 
of the most unworthy description, but it is impossible for 
us at this time to particularize them, inasmuch as the 
contagion of peculation and stock-jobbing in office ap- 
pears to have pervaded every avenue of the public service. 

Even our Honorable Ambassadors at the Courts of St. 
James and Madrid are not without some taint of the 
milder of those evils. But their conduct however undig- 
nified and reprehensible, is thrown completely in the 
shade by that of the principal representative of the Ad- 
ministration in Egypt, who is no less a personage than 
George H. Butler. At the date of his appointment, this 
typical Butler, was too well-known in the lower stratum of 
society, to give the President the " benefit of a doubt " as 
to his personal unfitness for any place of honor and trust, 
and his career abroad has rather more than sustained the 
natural expectations of those who knew him best. 

Located at the seat of Empire of the mother of all the 
sciences, and screening himself from punishment beneath 
the folds of that flag which he dishonors, Consul-General 
Butler has been from the first a debauchee in morals, and 
a trader in office. Brutal by nature, and profligate b}'' 
habit, he has only disgraced the office he has been per- 
mitted to occupy, without being able to fill, and the 
country which owed him nothing in the beginning, owes 
him something now, and that is, his immediate dismissal 
from all official connection with the Government, waving 
his recall. 

Under any one of our former Presidents an Ex-Gover* 
nor of a State, and a fugitive who had been impeached of 



I/O W. W. HOLDEN. 

high crimes and misdemeanors, tried, convicted, turned 
out of office, and forever disqualified to hold office under 
the Government of that State, would not have been con- 
sidered quite the sort of a man to represent this Govern- 
ment in the character of minister at a foreign Court. 
Such was W. W. Holden, recently of North Carolina, and 
General Grant in appointing him minister to Peru, has 
signified his acceptability as a fit exponent, not of the 
United States Government surely, but of the other U. S. 
G. whose lease upon it is fortunately about to expire ! 

We might proceed to show that when the indisputable 
proofs of the social and political delinquencies of various 
incumbents of Federal offices, as well those abovenamed 
as others, were laid before the Executive, not only were 
they retained in their places, but his evident displeasure 
was manifested towards such as had in this manner 
undertaken to remedy a public evil. 

For these things the President must be held morally 
responsible, for he who, having a knowledge of the fraudu- 
lent intent or practices of another, and whilst holding in 
his hand the power to thwart and put an end to them, 3^et 
refuses to act, makes himself in effect a party to the fraud 

The President of the United States is not himself above 
suspicion, and now that he is about to make his appeal to 
the people for their justification of his four years of churl- 
ish misrule, let us see to it that their verdict be in accord- 
ance with the requirements of honor and the principles of 
justice. 



CHAPTER XV. 

SUMMING UP. 

We have observed that upon the termination of the 
war, and the withdrawal of the two contending- forces 
from active operations in the field, General Grant estab- 
lished his permanent headquarters at the seat of govern- 
ment. At this period it does not appear that he had 
formed any decided views upon those topics which most 
nearly concerned the welfare of the nation. 

His political status could therefore be best estimated at 
zero. It was his occupation of this neutral ground to 
which he owed much of his popularity with the people. 
They had remarked, with an accuteness of perception 
which years of self-government had served to intensify, 
the approach of that fearful struggle which was to estab- 
lish the bounds of human liberty in the United States, and 
determine for all time the fate of the Republic, and they 
had watched with prayers and heart-yearnings, the 
wavering course of battle. 

Earnestly indeed they prayed for a warrior-chief over 
whose advancing columns might be seen to circle the 
ominous eagles of victory. At length he came ; dimly 
at first they saw him upon the war-plowed field, but as 
victory on victory followed in his course, closer and 
closer they gathered him to their hearts, and when at 
length the angel Peace came with his " healing wings," 
their prayers were answered and they asked no more. 

But he who had so manfully stood 

" on the perilous edge 
Of battle' 

»vas too firmly seated in their love to be given over to 

(171) 



172 SUMMING UP. 

the fate of common men, and as the time drew near wher 
the people were to choose their most exalted magistrate 
it was clear enough to be seen that the choice would fall 
upon General Grant. 

Now it was that our future President began to shape his 
opinions accordingly as he perceived the drift of public 
sentiment, for although in name there were two political 
parties in the field more or less thoroughly organized, 
many of the questions which had theretofore divided their 
councils, were no longer presented among the living issues 
of the day. The old political parties which had confront- 
ed each other upon so many fields, were in a state of dis- 
integration, and others were being formed upon questions 
which were newly presented, chiefly in regard to recon- 
struction and finance. Upon these new issues it was the 
policy of General Grant to remain silent. 

We have shown that he was prevailed upon by Presi- 
dent Johnson to accept the place of Secretary of War, ad 
interim, and become a member of his Cabinet, and, for a 
time, at least, his views upon public affairs, appear to have 
been in harmony with those of that official. Their subse- 
quent disagreements of a personal as well as political char- 
acter, have been dwelt upon at considerable length in a 
preceding chapter, and also the circumstances attending 
his nomination by the Chicago convention. 

It cannot be said that either of the two parties who 
presented candidates for the Executive office, were per- 
manently or even definitely formed. Nor can it be said 
that the unanimity with which the country rallied to the 
support of General Grant was indicative of anything 
more than a personal choice between one who had taken 
an active part in putting down the rebellion, and another 
concerning whom the impression had gone abroad, thai 
he had bitterly opposed the objects of the war, and was 
unwilling to accept its results. 

In a word, the condition of parties at this time was 
such, that a choice was made rather more upon personal 
than political grounds, the political element being at the 



SUMMING UP. 173 

best in a disorganized and incoherent state. It was the 
faith which was reposed in the integrity of Genera 
Grant as a man, and his abihty as an officer, and more 
than all, the common belief that he would be able before 
any other of our public men, to speedily restore the 
Southern States to their true relation to the Govern- 
ment, and so " temper justice Avith mercy," as to heal 
over the still bleeding wounds of the rebellion, which 
drew men to his standard. General Grant had induced 
this belief by giving utterance to a sentiment which met 
with the heart}^ response of the whole people, and the 
aphorism, " Let us have peace," was inscribed upon the 
banners of his party. He had also avowed his acquies- 
cence in the one term principle, which Andrew Jackson 
had urged upon the attention of Congress, years before, 
and which has ever since been gathering strength. It 
was the lack of this constitutional restriction which De 
Tocqueville, in his celebrated work upon " Democracy in 
America," pointed out as the one of greatest danger to 
our liberties. 

President Johnson likewise recommended a change in 
the Constitution in this regard, consequently when Gen- 
eral Grant showed himself so wise as to adopt the views 
of the;e distinguished men upon a measure of the first 
importance, it was received as an evidence of his states- 
manship. 

The two foregoing propositions were the only ones 
which General Grant openly and unqualifiedly announced 
previous to his inauguration. And now after nearly four 
years have passed away and we find that he is once 
more put in nomination for President, we have availed 
ourselves of a citizen's privilege in respect to a candidate 
for public office, by reviewing his official course in the 
past, for the benefit of those who are too deeply engaged 
in other things, to critically examine the facts for them- 
selves. Starting at the beginning of his official term we 
find it did not require the solemn pledges made in his in- 
augural address to bind his conscience to the faithful 



174 SUMMING UP. 

execution of the laws. The Constitution and his oath 
alike enjoined it, so that having all these in one day it is 
the more surprising that he should have broken them be- 
fore the setting of the sun, by the appointment of his 
military staff to serve in various capacities near his 
person. 

As General of the Army it was both proper and neces- 
sary that there should be attached to his headquarters, an 
ample mihtary staff, but on assuming the office of Presi- 
dent, he was not at all justified in taking these special 
aids with him into the White House, knowing well 
enough that the detailing of them to this service was con- 
trary to law, or if he did not know it, he committed 9 
blunder, which in politics " is worse than a crime." 

He has actually clothed one of these military officers, 
(illegally of course), with the most extraordinary powers, 
greater indeed than have ever been exercised by an accred 
ited ambassador at a foreign court, having conferred upon 
him authority to make a treaty shameful in itself, and turn- 
ing over to his command the United States Naval forces 
in foreign waters. 

He has provided the way for other favorites whilst 
holding commissions in the military service of the United 
States, to obtain offices of trust and other civil employ- 
ments, whereby large sums of money have been dis- 
honestly made by the practice of extortion. He has per- 
mitted a military ring to be formed about his person at 
the seat of government, and as it is believed, connived at 
the enlargement of the private fortunes of its members 
He has required Foreign Ministers, Members of Con- 
gress and civihans to run the gauntlet of this military 
ring in order to be admitted to his presence. He has ap- 
pointed his own relations to office in numbers exceeding 
those of all his predecessors. 

He sent one of one of his brothers-in-law — a foreigner — 

Consul to Leipsic, where after being pubHcly disgraced he 

could no longer remain, he was promoted Minister to Den- 

. mark, and although this brother-in-law has frequently and 



SUMMING UP. 175 

almost continually disgraced his latter office, the Presi- 
dent persits in keeping him in it. 

He has appointed another brother-in-law to be Collec- 
tor at the Port of New Orleans, and although this ap- 
pointee has twice conspired to overthrow the State gov- 
ernment of Louisiana, using the United States military and 
naval forces to effect his object, still he is retained in office 
against the remonstrance of respectable citizens. 

He appointed a cousin to the office of Ganger at Chicago 
whom after being detected in stealing and dismissed by 
the Treasurer, he promoted to be Sub-Treasurer, and 
Receiver at Washington Territory, and now he is said 
to be a defaulter to the Government to the extent of 
$39,000. 

He has appointed other and various of his relatives to 
honorable and lucrative offices upon the sole ground of 
their relationship. 

He has accepted presents of large sums of money from 
various persons, whom he afterwards rewarded with 
offices to which were attached large incomes. 

He has connived with the illegal head of an irresponsible 
Government, to turn over to the United States, for a 
consideration, the Government itself and all its lands, 
properties and liabilities. He has illegally, and by usur- 
pation of authority, employed the Naval forces of the 
United States to intimidate a defenceless people, and keep 
in power a military despot, who acquired his office 
through conspiracy. He also wantonly oppressed the 
inhabitants of a number of the States of this Union, sus- 
pending the writ of habeiis corpus, making numerous 
arrests therein under martial law. 

He has knowingly appointed corrupt and incompetent 
men to office, other than his relatives, and refused to dis 
miss others known to be guilty of peculation and fraud. 

He ha.> absented himself from the seat of Government 
for months at a time to the great detriment of public 
affairs. 

He has repeatedly, and in the most unbecoming man- 



176 SUMMING UP. 

ner, undertaken, by personal solicitation, and the use o 
Government patronage, to secure the passage of laws ir 
which he took an especial interest. 

He has, during the last two years, bargained and con- 
nived with others to effect his renomination for a second 
term of the office he now holds ; and to this end he has 
systematically distributed the public patronage among 
his friends, and employed the military forces to control 
elections in districts which are opposed to him. 

He has permitted American citizens in foreign countries 
to be imprisoned, and their property confiscated, without 
making any proper effort to effect their release. 

He has treacherously permitted the illegal sale of 
Government arms and munitions of war to one or two 
belligerent nations with whom we were at peace. 

He is addicted to habits of intemperance which at times 
unfit him for the discharge of public duties. 

He has allowed his venality to involve him in a class 
of transactions of questionable honesty. 

He has knowingly permitted the deputies and salaried 
clerks employed in the various departments of Govern- 
ment, to be taxed for the purpose of raising funds to in- 
fluence elections, which is in effect appropriating the 
public moneys to a fraudulent object. 

He has conspired, with others, to enrich a few favorites 
by depreciating the national currency at the expense of 
the national credit. 

He has countennnred and encouraged the wretched 
carpet-bag governments in the South, which have inflicted 
upon the reconstructed States, wrongs which it will re- 
quire a full half century to obliterate. 

He has committed blunders resulting from his inex- 
cusable ignorance of law. 

He has acted the part of a demagogue, by urging the 
passage of an act regulating the system of making ap- 
pointments to civil offices as if it required a statutory 
law to confer a constitutional right, or permit the exer- 
cise of a sound discretion ; and he has alternately adopted 



SUMMING UP. 177 

and abrogated the rules recommended by the commis- 
sioners of his own appointment. 

He has, in numerous instances, made tenure of office 
4^pend upon mere subserviency to his partisan schemes. 

He has bestowed pajnng offices, upon crafty and am- 
bitious parasites, who have shown him political favours. 

He has given his official sanction to monopolies which 
cut off enterprise and destroy competition. 

It signifies nothing, in a popular sense, that President 
Grant was renominated, and his policy endorsed at the 
late Philadelphia Convention. 

It was, indeed, a foregone conclusion, and the dele- 
gates, principals and proxies, might just as well have 
issued their orders from the Custom-Houses and other 
places of manufactured opinions, as to have gone through 
with the conventional formalities and that interesting 
spectacle of " the man on horseback." There was 
no heart in it ; nothing but the zeal begotten of patron- 
age and promises of future reward. 

But, their weakness is not to be despised. What they 
lack in moral force is compensated in money. Every 
federal office in the land is subsidized, and its incum- 
bents and their subordinates taxed to re-elect General 
Grant ! Drawbacks upon salaries have become a matter 
of course. It is in effect and in realit)'' the employment 
of the public moneys to corrupt the ballot, and it is 
arrived at by this circumlocutory process. The clerk 
who receives a $2,000 salary pays $100 of it back, and he 
knows what it is for, and so does General Grant. 

The case is different now from what it was in i868< 
Then the people broke loose from party leaders and would 
have Grant for President ! Now they want quite another 
sort of a man — one nearer themselves, who understands 
their wants, and shares with them the manly burdens of 
life ; and they have not set up their candidate without the 
exercise of reason and judgment. 

It is in vain that the alarmed leaders cry Halt ! or to 
the right or left ! The people are done with standing 
12 



178 SUMMING UP. 

under the shadow of a party name and wasting their 
strength in groundless divisions. No man is keen enough 
of perception to point out any clear distinction between 
what is termed a conservative republican and a war 
democrat. They are, indeed, one and the same ; and if 
the Cincinnati Convention was not the beginning and 
organization of a new political party, it was a gathering 
of men of all parties who, upon comparing notes, found 
there was no real difference between them. 

The party of the " Liberal Republicans " is the party 
of the people, and the leading issue of the campaign is 
between a purposed, honest and efficient government upon 
the one hand, and such an one as we now have, upon the 
other. 

It is absurd to claim that General Grant is a fair repre- 
sentative of Republican ideas. 

Putting him at the head of the Radical ticket does not 
make him so. He comes no nearer being a Republican 
than he does a Doctor of Laws, which the school-masters 
of " Old Harvard " have said he is. He may come up 
to their standard, but it is no compliment to men of 
learning to say so. Neither has the Executive set an 
example worthy to be followed in other respects. 

Like many of his favorites, he has grown suddenly 
rich. And how? Let us recall the words of the " Father 
of his country," in taking his farewell of the people on 
retiring from office. He says : 



" To conclude, and I feel proud of having it in my power to do so with 
truth, that it was not from ambitious views, it was not from ignorance of the 
hazard to which I knew I was exposing my reputation, it was not from an 
expectation of pecuniar)' compensation that I have yielded to the calls of 
my country ; and that if my country has derived no benefit from my ser- 
vices, mj' fortune, in a pecuniary point of view, has received no augmenta- 
tion from my country. But in delivering this last sentiment, let me be un- 
equivocally understood as not intending to express any discontent on my 
part, or to imply any reproach on my country on that account. [The first 
would be untrue — the other ungrateful. And no occasion more fit than 
the present may ever occur, perhaps, to declare, that nothing but the prin- 
ciple upon which I set out, and from which I have in no instance departed, 



SUMMING UP. 17c 

not to receive more fron. the public than my expenses, has restrained the 
bounty of several legislatures at the close ot the war with Great Britain 
from adding considerably to my pecuniary resources.] I retire from the 
chair of government no otherwise benefited in this particular, than what 
you have all experienced from the increased value of property, flowing from 
the peace and prosperity with which our country has been blessed amidst 
tumults which have harassed and involved other countries in all the hor- 
rors of war. I leave you with undefiled hands, an uncorrupted heart, and 
with ardent vows to heaven, for the welfare and happiness of that country 
in which I and my forefathers to the third or fourth progenitor drew our 
first breath." 

These are the closing words of Washington's farewell 
address. 

Let us fancy the terms in which General Grant could 
truthfully take leave of his office, in respect to the same 
matters ! 

Whence came his riches? and why is it that discord 
and commotion prevail in many parts of the country ? 

There never was a time of such general corruption on 
the part of those who are entrusted with office from the 
highest to the lowest. Leaving the President out of the 
question, how is it with some members of his cabinet ? 
Have they not wantonly violated the Constitution ? What 
have Mr. Creswell and Mr. Robeson to say to Art. 6 of 
Sec. ix, " No money shall be drawn from the Treasury 
but in consequence of appropriations made by law." 

An appropriation implies an object of appropriation. 
The law must make it and specify the object and not the 
Postmaster-General nor the Secretary of War ! 

An example of dishonesty in high places or what is just 
as bad, continual laxity, is always sure to be followed in 
lower ones. 

In respect to the Federal offices it appears as if he re 
garded them as so many rewards for personal rather than 
party fealty, for he certainlyhas not been at all particular 
as to the moral or political antecedents of his appointees ; 
if they only showed a proper adhesion to himself, either 
by " gifts " or vociferously clamoring for his re-election — 
gifts of $100,000, of $50,000, of $30,000, and so downward 
in numbers almost incredible, — gifts of houses, one in 



l8o SUMMING UP. 

Philadelphia, one in Washington, one at Long Branch ! 
gifts of stock in corporations — monopolies which largely 
depend upon Government patronage and favor for their 
profits. 

There is the " Alaska Commercial Company," about 
which there has been so much public scandal. The Pre- 
sident has stock in that Company, $30,000, of it, it is said. 
A good deal of favoritism was shown toward this Com- 
pany at the start, in its efforts to get under way, and if 
reports are to be believed, the management of its affairs 
in our newly acquired Territory among the icebergs, in 
connection of the fur trade, is reckless in the extreme. 

Then there is the " Seneca Sand-Stone Company," 
whose first officer is Governor Cook, of the new Terri- 
tory of Columbia. The President holds $25,000 of stock 
in this company, which has been awarded the stone con- 
tract for the new State Department Building, contrary 
to the express orders of the Building Committee of Con- 
gress, and to the great detriment of that structure and it 
s easy to understand what influences have overmatched 
Iheir instructions. 

These presents of money, houses, stock, and whatever 
else were accepted by the President without hesitation, 
even with avidity, and compensated indirectly out of the 
Public Treasur)"-, as in the instance of Leet and Murphy 
with their $100,000 per annum. 

It is all wrong that there should be any office in the 
Republic, to which are attached such extravagant in- 
comes. No one man's services are so pre-eminently 
above another's as to command a hundred times more 
pay, nor should it be tolerated. It is short-sighted 
enough to say that these immense incomes are paid by 
the Government, or come out of the Custom's revenue. 
What is the Government, which finally pays the tax upon 
imports? He who buys the necessaries of life, and is 
barely able to balance accounts at the end of the year, 
pays something towards the $100,000, which go into 
the pockets of our representatives, Leets and Murphys. 



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